


You Found Me

by juliaaamarieee



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Fluff, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coming Out, Cursed Hyperion Heights (Once Upon a Time), Drama, Endgame Evil Queen | Regina Mills/Emma Swan, F/F, Future Fic, Gay, Heavy Angst, Hyperion Heights (Once Upon a Time), Romance, Slow Burn, Storybrooke (Once Upon a Time), lots of feels, regal believer heavy, season 7, swanqueen - Freeform, swanqueen is engame
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-01-27 05:40:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21387004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juliaaamarieee/pseuds/juliaaamarieee
Summary: Set loosely in season 7, a dark curse carries Storybrooke's residents to Hyperion Heights, wiping their memories--everyone's except Emma's.  Beaten down by her husband, she'd moved away four years ago, breaking Regina's heart along with her. When Emma realizes her mistake and tries to find her family, Regina's gone, replaced by Roni's persona: a spunky bartender who helps Emma pick through her psychological damage...and maybe falls for her along the way, too. However, things may be more complicated than they seem...
Relationships: Cinderella | Jacinda Vidrio/Henry Mills, Evil Queen | Regina Mills & Henry Mills, Evil Queen | Regina Mills/Emma Swan, Henry Mills & Emma Swan, Lucy & Henry Mills (Once Upon a Time)
Comments: 39
Kudos: 110





	1. Prologue

**STORYBROOKE, MAINE, 2019.**

A hand of the clock on the clock tower on Main Street clicks down, showing a quarter past eight. Below, a town full of modern fairytale residents bustle about, enjoying the sunshine of the particularly warm September morning.

Magical emergencies are few and far-between nowadays in Storybrooke, tucked away in a quiet, hidden corner of Maine. Now, people embrace their modern lifestyles and go about their normal lives, performing normal tasks, going to work, going to lunch, heading home, and doing the same thing all over again the next day. 

It's exactly the sort of thing that drives Henry Mills insane. Eighteen years old, fresh out of Storybrooke High, and absolutely tired of just existing, watching the town pass by, but hardly feeling apart of it, desperately waiting for his life to begin. However, what's a perfectly normal day for the majority of the town, is by contrast a monumental one for the Mills family. 

Today is the day that Henry leaves. 

The moment he'd woken up on that bright Tuesday morning, he'd felt different in his bones. He'd glanced around the room, noting the bare walls and feeling a sort of nostalgic pang, but overcome with a buzzing excitement from deep within him, knowing that today, _finally_, he's leaving. Going. Even escaping. 

It's not at all that he doesn't adore this town or the people in it, and he knows without a doubt that he'll desperately miss the most important people in his life, but he's been waiting for this moment for as long as he can remember--where he can grab his things, shut the door, kiss his mothers goodbye, and drive away, to find...

To find his story. That's all it is, isn't it? Henry Mills, the young Author, wielding one of the most powerful tools in all the realms, writing every single other person's story but his own. 

His thoughts are interrupted by a loud rapping on his door. "Wake up, Kid, your mom needs to start bright and early on her sobbing-and-hugging agenda if we're ever going to get you out the door by noon."

_Oh, right._ He shrugs into a hoodie and opens the door to find Emma, who looks as though she's about to knock again. "Good morning to you, too, Ma."

Emma grins, pulling him into a hug that lasts significantly longer than her usual squeezes. He feels her breathe him in, sinking her fingertips into his back. He melts into her, too, trying hard to remember his fervency to leave. _The last day_ is weighing on everyone's mind--even if it's just the last day, for now.

He breaks away first, hands on her shoulders, and studies her face. Still paler than he remembers it in years past, hair slightly faded, but still Emma. And it's times like these when he's overwhelmingly glad that when she's around him and Mom, she acts like the _Emma_ he knows, instead of _Mrs. Jones_. He glances down at the gold band on her finger and swallows. Following his gaze, Emma seems to read his thoughts, and uncomfortably twists the ring with her thumb, bending her fingers back to hide it from view. From her back pocket, her phone chimes, but she ignores it. 

"C'mon, Kid, your mom made pancakes."

Henry shakes himself from his thoughts, and links his arm in hers, gesturing with his other hand towards the staircase. "After you, m'lady." 

Emma snorts, dragging him along with her, tripping on the first few steps. "Dork."

"Nerd," Henry shoots back immediately, and Emma turns with a smirk on her lips. 

"That's rich coming from Mr. Comic Book as well as the freaking Author of the universe or whatever, but _sure_, I'm the nerd."

Henry grins at her and, though he's not proud of it, sticks out his tongue a little. "Just because _I'm_ a nerd, doesn't make you any less of one."

That one stops his blonde mother for a second, who squints at him before cracking a smile. "You got me there."

Henry makes a show of brushing imaginary lint off of himself and puffing up his chest. 

"Idiot," Emma whispers, and Henry walks past her, smacking her lightly on the side of the head as he does so. He retreats to the kitchen before Emma can make her next move. 

He shimmies next to Regina at the stove, squeezing her shoulder and kissing her temple. "Morning, Mom," he says, watching her turn towards him with a smile, paired with unmistakable sadness in her eyes. 

Not for the first time, a wave of guilt washes over him, but he does his best to ignore it. He's spent too long laboring over this issue both internally and externally with his mothers to rehash it now. Instead, he makes up for it by helping her finish preparing breakfast, setting the table, and turning up the charm, though he finds he doesn't have to force it. As he sits at his spot at the island counter, a current of sadness pushes against his chest, presenting him with the thought that he doesn't know how long it'll be before he has the chance to do this again. Forcing it back and swallowing the lump in his throat, he grins across the table at his mothers and tries to fit a whole pancake in his mouth in one bite. 

\---

Regina has known for a long time. She's probably known for over a year, by now, that this day was coming. Knowing this, she should've had more than enough time to prepare. Still, as she watches Henry stand up from his seat and carry his dishes to the sink, taller than he's ever been and wearing his new brown leather jacket, her heart sinks in her chest despite how happy she truly is for him. She didn't have to be told to know that he's been waiting for a day like this all his life--and while life in Storybrooke for him had grown significantly better than when he was ten years old, and though she knows that he truly does love her and even the town--she knows, deep down, that he needs this. For too long she's sheltered him and ignored the fact that he's no longer a little boy, and she knows that for him to truly grow up and to become his own person, he has to leave. She knows this. 

But if she does, why does the lump in her throat grow ever larger, and why is the wetness in her eyes threatening to overflow? 

She can sense Emma's eyes on her, and when she works up the courage, she glances over. Their eyes lock, and she sees something she hadn't expected. Instead of pity, there's a deep understanding. And instead of the dull, glazed-over effect Regina had reluctantly grown used to since Emma had officially tied the knot with the One-handed Wonder, they're bright and green. Taken aback -- overwhelmed with nostalgia for the Emma she once knew, the Emma that only begins to shine through the cracks whenever she's around Regina for long enough, instead of the new, little housewife shell she's built up around herself -- Regina has to look away.

Not today. She can't labor over this today. Not when it's the day Henry is leaving home.

She watches Henry finish loading his plate into the dishwasher before straightening and turning slowly to face his mothers. They look at each other, Henry pressing his palms into tops of his thighs, fingers picking at the denim, ignoring what's to come. None of them want to say goodbye.

They remain like that for a moment--it couldn't have been over ten seconds, though it felt like just as many minutes--before Henry clears his throat. "Um. I guess I'll go get my stuff from upstairs."

Emma jumps a little, springing up from the island and following him closely out of the room. "I'll help you."

Regina almost moves to follow them, but stops herself. It's not hard to tell that Emma is doing her best to distract herself, whether to avoid being alone in a room with Regina, or to continue ignoring the buzzing of her phone in her pocket, Regina doesn't know, but she lets her go. She tries not to think about the sinking in her chest as she does so.

\---

Emma tails Henry up the stairs, hand ghosting up the railing as she takes a moment to look at the pictures lining the walls. Amid the school pictures of Henry and other old photos, Emma finds herself in many of the frames, fitting in smoother than silk with Regina and Henry, smiling her most genuine, face-splitting grins in several candid shots. She frowns when she realizes that none of the photos like that are particularly new, and she finds herself wondering when they stopped having family picnics or outings to Disneyland.

The back of her mind nags her with an image of her husband and an unwanted, buried memory submerges of a nasty argument that occurred a couple of years ago when Killian expressed his unwavering distrust of Regina and his jealousy of those outings, especially when he had time off of work, and what was wrong with a man wanting to spend time with his wife, anyway? And Emma, ashamed, had sought forgiveness and guiltily turned down invitations to such outings with Regina and Henry since then.

The memory turns her stomach, and her hand moves to her phone in her back pocket, hand shaking slightly as she switches it to silent. The lockscreen flashes her with several missed calls and texts.

**Killian: we need to talk.**  
**Killian: please pick up, luv.**  
**Killian: emma, this isn't funny anymore.**  
**Killian: I'm going down to the docks. Don't wait up for me.**

Emma swallows and pockets her phone. She reaches the top of the stairs and follows Henry into his room. His bed is uncharacteristically made, and the room is clean, but not exactly bare. She turns her attention to the bed again, noting the small pile of bags covering the comforter.

She turns to her son. "That's it?" 

He nods, but doesn't turn to look at her. She studies his face, sees the clench in his jaw and the determined glint to his eye, softened by the layer of glaze covering them. She watches him sweep his gaze across his room and stuff his hands in his pockets before finally turning to face her.

"Ma...you'll keep her company, won't you? You'll watch over her?"

She doesn't have to ask who he means. Her stomach flips and the lump in her throat resurfaces as she remembers the nature of the argument with Killian last night; the one that caused all of the texts and calls today. She doesn't voice any of this. Instead, she gives him a sad smile and lays a hand on his shoulder, trying not to think about the way she has to raise her arm higher than she'd remembered needing to in order to do so. "Of course I will."

Guilt throbs in her ears, but she ignores it. Henry and promising him and easing his mind is the only thing that matters right now.

He visibly relaxes under her touch, and his shoulders slump. "Thank you. I just--I worry about her, Ma." 

Emma finds herself rubbing at his shoulder, the leather of his coat unfamiliar on her palm. "I know you do, Kid, and that's good, and you're an amazing son for worrying, but she's a really strong badass, remember?"

Henry grins, the hardness of his jaw easing. "I know, I know. She's just different with me. It's always been different with me."

Emma's heart softens, and she feels unbidden tears prick her eyes. "She loves you. More than anything, you know that, don't you?"

Henry looks at her--really _looks_\--his eyes soft and searching and far too perceptive, and looks as though he desperately wants to tell her something. His mouth opens and closes, and he shakes his head. "Yeah," he says instead, giving her a small smile and grasps her bicep before releasing it and returning his hand to his side. "Thanks, Ma."

Emma squeezes his shoulder and grabs a couple of bags, leaving the room.

Henry watches her go, his heart heavy in his chest. Her words echo in his mind: _she loves you. More than anything, you know that, don't you?_ His throat begins to close as he watches her disappear down the steps. Because there's something that Emma will never know, and something he's not sure even his other mother knows.

_I'm not the only one she loves, Ma._

\---

Regina watches Emma and Henry descend the staircase, Henry lagging behind and glancing at the walls, seemingly to take in his surroundings in a last-ditch effort to say goodbye to the house. He places his bag in the small pile Emma had created at the foot of the stairs, straightening slowly. He catches Regina's gaze and sends her a quiet, small smile.

They begin walking towards each other at the same time, and they meet in the middle. "Mom," Henry breathes out before her body collides with his. He wraps his arms around her waist, feeling the expensive fabric of her shirt-and-skirt combo beneath his fingers, and breathing in her perfume. 

Regina digs her fingertips into his back, settling her chin over his shoulder, feeling the prick in her eyes return. "My Little Prince--" she begins, stopping when she feels Henry twitch and inhale sharply under her touch.

He pulls back--not letting go of her completely, but enough to look her in the eyes (and she tries not to think about the fact that their gazes are perfectly level, heels and all)--and only then does she see the tears forming in his own eyes. "Mom, you know why I have to do this, don't you?"

A thousand conversations pass through her mind--the countless times he'd gently brought up this inevitable moment, easing her into the fact that he was leaving, explaining why he needed this--and she nods. "To--" she begins, her voice breaking. She clears her throat, repeating his own words, the words the she'd labored with for nights on end before falling asleep, and had since memorized. "To find your story."

Henry nods slowly, his eyes wide and wet and so full of love that Regina nearly melts under his gaze. "There are a thousand realms, a thousand stories to record; and, who knows, maybe I'll find a piece of myself along the way." He shrugs a little, his voice soft, and Regina finds herself wondering once again when she'd looked away and he'd grown up without her. "But I'll never know if I don't go. I just have to--I _need_ to--see what the rest of the world has to offer. I'll come home," He promises, watching Regina close her eyes and allow the tears to trail down her cheeks, before looking towards Emma and nodding at her before repeating himself. "I'll come home."

He leans in, squeezing Regina again. She holds onto him like he's her lifeline; she combs through his brown hair with her shaking fingers and breathes in a shuddering breath. "I believe in you, Henry. I always have. And I'll be waiting for you when you find your way home," she whispers into his ear, feeling his breath hitch. "_I love you._"

He rubs his hands up and down her back before leaning forward and pressing a long kiss onto her forehead. "I love you, Mom."

And then he's drawing away, and Regina feels the absence like a ton of bricks as their intertwined fingers untangle and her arm falls to her side once more.

\---

Emma's heart clenches during Henry and Regina's goodbye. Shuffling on her feet, she stuffs her hands in her back pockets and fixes her eyes on the impeccably clean tiles underfoot to give them some privacy. _They really have something special_, she thinks, before she bites on the inside of her cheek, and an unbidden memory surfaces.

_The California sun beams down on Emma, forcing her to shield her eyes with her hand, laughing at the exchange unfolding in front of her._

_Regina and Henry are posing for a picture for the photographer--with the "Evil Queen." Regina's lips are curled into a struggling sneer, and laughter is clear in her eyes as Henry doubles over on the other side of the unsuspecting Disneyland actress. It takes a few minutes, but the photographer finally snaps a picture and Henry scans his wristband before they rejoin Emma, who's still grinning._

_She slaps her son on the shoulder, unable to reign in her giggles. "Wow, Kid, I can't believe you got her to do that."_

_She glances over at Regina, whose arms are crossed, but she's smiling just as much as Emma and her son. Henry wanders off towards another ride, and Emma touches Regina's arm before she can stop herself. The gesture is far softer and gentler than she planned, but she watches as Regina turns toward her with an equally gentle smile._

_"You two really have something special," Emma tells her sincerely, and it could have been the bright sunshine, but Emma could have sworn that she saw wetness gathering in the brunette's eyes. _

_Regina nods shyly and smiles at the ground, her face full of awe and true, unbridled happiness. Emma's not surprised by this; as simple as her statement had sounded, it's still somehow monumental for them. One day, they're threatening each other and fighting vehemently over their son, unintentionally pulling him in either direction until they nearly tore themselves apart--and the next...they're here._

_They're here, and it's everything to them. It almost scares Emma, but she refuses to think about it. Instead, they link arms and catch up to their son, and for a short summer afternoon, everything feels perfect and right._

_Neither of them think about what that means._

Emma pulls herself from the memory, one that was spoiled too soon by an angry phone call later that night with her husband, and she'd ended up having to catch an early flight home. That was their last trip with just the three of them. Emma's stomach turns as she watches Henry kiss his other mother goodbye. Should she have fought more to keep those annual trips going? Why did she catch that early flight? Why couldn't she have waited one more night in order to leave with Regina and Henry, no matter what she may have to fix and mend at home? Looking at them now, she wonders if they'll ever have another trip like that again. Somehow, the pit in her stomach makes her doubt it.

But now Henry's walking towards her, and she has to push her swirling thoughts out of her mind, and suddenly all she can feel is her son's bone-crushing hug, and she welcomes the feeling. She doesn't want to think about how long it might be before his head will curl again over her shoulder or his arms will squeeze her middle. Almost in slow-motion, Emma raises her own arms and wraps them around her son.

Emma opens her mouth to speak, but words refuse to come to her. She doesn't know how to say goodbye to the boy in front of her. Though a lifetime had occurred since the little boy with a messy mop of brown hair and an expensive pea coat had knocked on her door in Boston, it still feels as though it were yesterday. Even as he's beginning to surpass her in height now, when she looks at him, she sometimes still sees the same little boy. 

And now, he's leaving her. And she doesn't know exactly how to deal with that.

"Kid," she barely gets out before her throat closes up. "Kid--be safe out there." The very words bring tears to her eyes, and she's forced to suck in a loud, shuddering breath, and she bites again on the inside of her cheek.

"I know," he murmurs into her ear, and she feels his hand palm the back of her head. The gesture only makes the urge to cry stronger, and she curls her fingers hard into the leather covering his broadening back. "I'm gonna miss you, Ma," he tells her.

Emma swallows so hard she thinks she may have taken her tongue as well. "I'm--me too, Kid. Me, too." She pats him on the back, and they back away from each other, though reluctantly. "Take care of yourself." 

Henry nods, looking down a little, blinking back tears.

"I mean it," she presses, and the emotion in her voice causes him to look up at her, and identical wet green irises meet and hold the contact. "Come home safe to us."

"I promise," he tells her, and Emma can sense the raw honesty in his voice. "Take care of Mom," he adds, softer now, gesturing behind him slightly with his head. Then, a smirk curls his lips. "I mean it."

Emma smiles a little, glad for the heavy mood to have been lifted slightly. "You got it, smartass." 

He leans in again, squeezing her tight, and Emma's entire body feels the finality of the motion. "I love you, Ma."

Emma nods, the lump in her throat feeling as though she'd swallowed a golf ball. "I love you, Kid."

Then he's backing away and grabbing his small bags, waving once more before walking out the front door and down the driveway. Wordlessly, Emma and Regina follow him, watching as he straps the bags to himself and his motorcycle. Emma feels Regina tense as Henry straddles the bike and kicks up the stand, the motor roaring to life. He waves once more and they return the gesture--

\--and then he's reaching into his pocket, throwing the magic bean in front of him, and a portal opens in the middle of Mifflin Street. He shifts his weight from his foot on the road to the bike, and then he's gone.

The portal waits for a few moments after the bike disappears into the unknown, and then it collapses, leaving only a few rustling leaves in its wake.

His mothers turn towards each other, eyes wide, wordless, breathless. And for a few minutes, the world is completely quiet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! This is basically a rework of Once Upon a Time's Season 7, where Emma escapes her marriage to Hook, the curse is cast differently, and SwanQueen is endgame. I really hope you enjoy!


	2. Feel Free to Talk

Emma and Regina stand on the porch in silence for a few minutes longer, listening to the leaves swirl on the pavement and the cool wind whistle through the trees, taming the warmth of the sun rising steadily in the sky. When Emma finally works up the courage to glance at Regina, she finds her staring at the street with a creased forehead, eyes fixed on the exact place the portal had closed five minutes before--almost as if she expects it to open back up again and for Henry to burst right out of it. Then again, if the wetness in her eyes is any indication, Emma can tell that Regina knows far better than that, and that she’ll have to endure a much longer wait in order to see her--_their_\--son again. 

Emma opens her mouth to speak, but words refuse to come to her. What would she say? What does Regina want her to say? Does she even want her here at all? Emma’s heart begins to pound, though she doesn’t know why. Suddenly, Emma wishes for Henry’s presence stronger than ever before. Though it scares her, Emma realizes that all she wants is for the pained look on Regina’s face to fade away and for her tears to dry--and she realizes she has absolutely no way to give that to her. The realization twists Emma’s gut and she has to look away. The wind swirls Emma’s long blonde hair around her face for a couple more minutes, the strands sticking in her lip gloss--before she decides to give Regina some space and she steps back inside the mansion, closing the front door quietly behind her. She wonders if Regina had watched her leave; she hadn’t allowed herself to check. Now on the other side of the door, Emma exhales a long breath, feeling tears prick her eyes.

She can’t believe he’s really gone. It’s hard to believe that ten minutes before, Emma stood where she is now, hugging her son and telling him to stay safe in the big bad world out there. Except instead of someplace like New York, it’s another realm, a rare portal jump away, where communication with the outside world is out of the question and the drinking age is significantly lower. Yeah, it’s been a grand total of ten minutes, and Emma’s already in danger of hyperventilating over things she can’t control. When had she become such a _mom_? Eight years ago, when Henry found her back in her old apartment in Boston, she didn’t even know how to talk to children, and now, here she is. 

And then there’s Regina. Regina, who’s likely finally allowing her tears to fall now that Emma’s left her alone, and she has no idea how to help her--and she has no idea why it matters so much to her. But, then again, Emma thinks she knows--through it all, after _everything_, Emma knows that Regina is her best friend. When she has news, the first person she wants to tell is Regina. When she can’t sleep late at night and she needs someone to whisper into the phone for a few hours, she calls Regina. When she’s at work in the station and she’s bored, she goes to City Hall across the street with a paper bag of Granny’s in hand to bug Regina and eat lunch with her. When there’s a new action movie she wants to see, she asks Regina to come with, because she knows that superheroes are one of Regina’s guilty pleasures. When she’s having parenting issues or she’s unsure of what to do about something concerning Henry, she asks Regina.

After everything, Regina has become so _important_ to her, and it makes the buzzing in her pocket even worse. Bile rises in her throat when she thinks about the context of the argument with Killian last night, and it threatens to spill into her mouth when she imagines Regina finding out about it. What she would say. What she would do.

It’s not like Emma doesn’t understand where Killian is coming from. It’s not _his_ fault she can’t get pregnant. 

The sick pushes against her throat again as the tears in her eyes finally splash across her cheeks. Her palm settles against the front of her flat--_empty_\--belly, and she bites again on the inside of her cheek to stifle a sob. What the hell is _wrong_ with her? 

“Come on, Swan, get it together, come on,” she mutters to herself, straightening and brushing the back of her hand across her wet eyes before entering the kitchen. She warms up the coffee leftover in the pot from earlier that morning, trying to convince herself that she’s okay. She _is_ okay, isn’t she? 

She’s so busy with the coffee and controlling her emotions that she doesn’t hear Regina join her in the kitchen a few minutes later. She’s jolted from her dark, swirling thoughts by an olive-toned hand reaching into the cabinet above her for a couple of clean mugs.

“Here,” Regina coaxes, gently taking the pot from Emma’s fingers and pouring a generous amount into a green mug before handing it to her. Emma accepts it gratefully, stirring in spoonfuls of sugar before taking a long sip.

“Thanks,” she tells her, her voice coming out hoarse and something barely above a whisper. Tears fill her eyes again, and this time, Emma doesn’t know which issue she’s crying about. Maybe all of them.

Regina prepares her own coffee and shakes her head, sitting down at the island counter, cradling her mug in her hands. “Well, this is it.”

Emma furrows her eyebrows, taking a seat across from her and absently tucking her hair behind her ears. “This is what?”

“Our first day without him.” Regina says, and it’s so _simple_, but it’s so much more than that. She’d said _“our”_\--not only acknowledging both of their pain, but also recognizing both of their important roles in Henry’s life; and even more than that--she’d hinted at the notion that they will both heal from this _together_.

Emma doesn’t even allow her mind to wander to their past as enemies to each other; her head is already spinning enough as it is. Instead, she just nods, accepting it, and takes another swallow. “He’s really gone, huh?”

Regina lets out a humorless laugh, a smirk curling her painted lips before she disappears behind her mug. “I’m afraid it’s just you and me now, Dear.”

Emma’s eyes dart upwards towards the brunette, feeling as though the air had just been knocked out of her lungs. _I’m afraid it’s just you and me?!_ What did she mean by that? Why did that comment make the blood rise in her cheeks and her breath hitch? Again, her mind flicks to last night, and shame covers her like a blanket. “I--”

She’s interrupted by a loud buzzing from her jean pocket--it’s not a text this time; it’s a call. Emma’s heart plummets down a flight of stairs and her cheeks flame, though she’s not sure why. She hates when Killian comes up between her and Regina. Emma has always known how much Regina hates Killian, and the feeling is mutual between them. There’s a past a mile wide between Regina and Hook and a chasm deep, and Emma and Regina have their own past of arguments concerning him. Even now, the corner of Regina’s mouth lifts into a sneer alongside the quirk of her right eyebrow. “Are you going to answer that?” she asks dryly, most likely not only referring to now, but also to the countless other attempts of communication Emma had turned down since she had arrived at the mansion early that morning.

Emma swallows hard as she takes out her phone, considering the call covering the screen for a moment before instead pressing down on the lock button and turning off her phone completely. “Uhm...no,” she mumbles in answer to Regina’s question, placing the black-screened, silenced phone on the island top next to her.

The sassy expression melts off of Regina’s face as quickly as it had come. Worry covers her features instead, and Emma wonders briefly when Regina’s eyes had gotten so _soft_. “Is everything okay, Emma?” She asks gently, and the way she says it makes it obvious that she _knows_ that it’s not, but she’s using her words as a way for Emma to decide whether or not she wants to talk about it.

Somehow, hearing Regina ask brings the tears to the surface again, and before she knows it, tears are trailing down her quickly reddening cheeks.”I--” she begins, her voice breaking into a million pieces.

Across the island, Regina’s face is scrunched into worry and pity and care, and it’s too much for Emma. In slow motion, she watches as Regina reaches across and squeezes Emma’s knuckles that are balled into an anxious fist. “_Emma_,” Regina murmurs, and it’s halfway between coaxing and soothing.

Emma clears her throat and starts again, suddenly intensely grateful for the opportunity to raise from her chest what had been weighing so harshly on her mind and heart. “It’s just, Killian and I, kind of--well.”

Regina’s eyes widen almost comically large, and her jaw drops. “Emma, did you two _break up?_” And for a moment, Emma almost thinks she sees a flash of hope in her eyes that lasts only a fraction of a second before she masks it with concern.

Emma shakes her head quickly, waving a hand in front of herself. “No, no, no--nothing like that. We just...fought, I guess.”

Regina slowly releases the tight grip she’d had on Emma’s hand, one she hadn’t even noticed she’d been holding. “Oh...oh. What did you fight about?”

Emma bites her lip. The tears in her eyes renew and she moves her hands to her face, cradling her head in her hands and stares at the granite countertop to avoid seeing Regina’s expression. She needs to say it. She needs to tell _someone_ besides Killian. Someone has to know about her failure. “I--I can’t get pregnant. And Killian wants to move.” 

\---

Regina instantly feels as though she’s been doused with a bucket of ice-cold water. Her jaw drops slightly and tears spring to her eyes, unbidden, as the air around them rings with the Emma’s words. Her heart slams in her throat as a million emotions race through her, each one stronger than the last. Shock, pity, _anger_\--towards Hook--and before she knows what she’s doing, she’s reaching across the counter and gently removing Emma’s violently shaking hands to look at her face.

She’s greeted with red, glistening eyes that are staring up at her in a way that absently reminds Regina of a puppy, and lips pressed tightly together in a valiant effort to stop their quivering. She holds Regina’s gaze for a few moments before her eyes dart away and squeeze shut, blinded by her misplaced shame.

“Emma--” Regina breathes out, and it’s all that she can say before her throat closes up and her tongue grows a few sizes in her mouth, forced to wait for the other woman to continue.

The blonde blinks a few more tears from her eyes and Regina watches as the saltwater trails down her cheeks and splashes onto the countertop. “We try, and we try--” she swallows roughly, hanging her head slightly so that her hair shields parts of her face from Regina. “We’ve been trying for _two years_ now, and I...threw out my birth control, and I _can’t_\--”

Regina finds her voice again as she begins rubbing Emma’s hands between her own. “Emma, Dear, you _know_ this isn’t your fault,” she reminds her gently, feeling her heart ache almost painfully for her best friend. She remembers feeling this exact unrelenting pain herself, and her eyes glaze over with just the thought of it.

Emma continues on as if she hadn’t heard her. “--and we’ve gone to the doctor so many times, and they keep saying nothing’s wrong, _nothing’s wrong_, but something _goddamned well_ must be, and there’s _nothing_ I can do about it.” And Emma’s heart slams bitterly in her chest as she says so. Every time she has a period, the sight of the red in her underwear makes her sick and she finds herself vomiting into the toilet--a sickness completely unrelated to the menstrual pains. Every time she opens a box of tampons, the packaging seems to mock her, yet another reminder of her infertility. _Barren. Wasted._

Regina massages the fingers under her grasp. “Emma...I hope that you know that I’m here. I know there’s nothing I can do, but--”

Emma shakes her head, finally meeting Regina’s gaze. “No. No, you’re doing everything for me. Thank you. This has been eating me up from the inside for a long time. It feels good to finally tell someone about it.”

Regina smiles, but soon replaces it with a frown as she asks about the person she least wants to talk about, but knows is essential to this conversation. “And...Hook?”

Emma sighs, shaking her head again as her eyes turn away. “Killian is...devastated, I guess. He’s wanted kids ever since we married.”

Regina quirks an eyebrow. “You guess?”

“It’s been hard. I mean, it’s been taking a toll on me, too, and it doesn’t help when he brings up how _torn up_ he is about it all the time.”

A flash of hot anger sears through Regina, and she has to close her eyes to calm down. _One...two...three...one hundred._ She opens her eyes, trying not to let her distaste show. Of all the _inconsiderate, bull-headed, sorry excuses for a husband--_

“It’s not like his insides are the problem. I’m the one who’s screwed up. But he just wants to try all the time--_all the time_\--and I--” she stops then, as if realizing how much she’s said. 

“Emma…” Regina begins slowly, looking at the other woman sharply in the eyes. “Is everything okay?” She doesn’t have to specify what she means--the _with your husband_ had been omitted. 

Emma ducks her head further. “I’ve said too--I’m not trying to badmouth Killian. It’s not fair that he wants kids and I can’t give them to him.”

Regina feels another flash of blind anger, and her hands unconsciously clench Emma’s. “Emma Swan, that is _bullshit_, and you know it.”

Emma looks back up at her, and for the first time, she begins to look heated. “No, it’s not. We’ve tried a million times, and I’m still getting my friggin’ period each month so _clearly_ something is wrong. And it’s not fair to him for me to trivialize his pain.”

Regina opens her mouth quickly, then bites her tongue. Every time Emma defends her husband, Regina feels a part of her clench inside and her head slam. It’s not fair. _It’s not fair._ Regina remembers the Emma Swan she used to know, the one who never let a man tell her what to do or how to feel, and she wonders uneasily when the pirate had managed to break that woman down almost completely. She’s about to ask Emma to stop defending him when a terrible realization comes to mind.

“Is this why he wants to move?” The words alone make the hair on Regina’s arms and the back of her neck stand on end. Her stomach turns as she fears for the answer.

By now, the Emma that only shows through when she’s around Regina and Henry has diminished for the day, and hollow eyes stare back at her. “Killian thinks maybe we’ll have better chances somewhere where magic isn’t an issue.”

Regina feels physical bile rise up in her throat and her hands release Emma’s, as if reacting from touching something burning hot. “Oh, my god,” she whispers. She knows what this means. Killian must think that the magic in Storybrooke--no, not the town, in _Emma_, part of what makes Emma who she _is_\--is impeding Emma’s pregnancy chances, and instead of letting things happen naturally, or considering adoption, he wants to pull Emma away from her home and her family in order for her to become a better baby machine.

She pushes her forgotten, cold coffee aside, feeling truly sick now as she stands. “Oh, no, Emma.” 

Emma narrows her eyes, her walls now fully up around herself, that housewife model that makes Regina want to shake her. _Wake up, Emma. Wake up, dammit!_ “What, Regina?” She asks, and her voice is testy, as though she knows exactly _“what.”_

Regina shakes her head. “This is wrong. This is very wrong--you _must_ know that. This is no reason for that pirate to drag you away from your home--your _family_\--for something that has nothing to do with it. Your magic is perfectly fine, _Emma_,” she pleads, begging her to wake up. She doesn’t even want to imagine Emma leaving her--her family, she means--holed up somewhere in a leaky old apartment, getting slammed against a rickety headboard every night until she’s raw and sore. She doesn’t want to imagine several children crowded in that same apartment, only seeing their grandparents once a year and likely never meeting Henry...never meeting _her_. The thought makes her dizzy, and she clutches onto the side of the island counter.

“‘_That pirate_’ is my husband, Regina.” Emma bites back, and it doesn’t escape Regina that that was the only point she chose to respond to. 

“Don’t I know it.” Regina responds bitterly, no longer angry, only sad. Sorry because she knows that the reason why she barely recognizes the woman in front of her is because she’s stuck inside a marriage she doesn’t even realize she trapped in.

Emma stands. “Thanks for breakfast. I think I should go.” Her words are still clipped but less angry; more reserved. Her mouth is still set in a thin line as she looks at Regina.

Regina sighs, stretching out her arm for a moment to touch the other woman’s shoulder. “Goodbye, Emma,” she says, and there’s a world of meaning in her words.

And then she’s gone, and Regina feels her heart break.

\---

Emma doesn’t go home right away. She eats lunch at Granny’s and goes to the gym and jogs on the treadmill for awhile, taking her time before she finally pulls into her driveway around three in the afternoon. Still, after she pulls the keys out of the ignition, she lingers in the car for awhile longer, not particularly wanting to enter her house. She doesn’t want to face him.

She’s been dwelling on her conversation with Regina in her mind all day, certain parts of it bothering her. It’s not that she’s angry with the brunette--and she never _really_ was, Regina just doesn’t _understand_\--but it’s what the other woman had said about her magic.

Could it be true? Could her magic not be the problem--could this issue really not be her fault? The thought makes her heart leap a little in her chest. Too long she’s spent bashing herself over these issues, crying herself to sleep and countless pregnancy tests; could it be that Killian is wrong? 

She doesn’t want to move. That much is certain, that much she knows. These past eight years, she’s built up a _home_ for herself--the first true one she’s ever had--and found her family. And yeah, the weather’s not great and it likes to rain a lot here, not to mention the countless magical, life-threatening emergencies she’s encountered in this town, but it’s all she’s ever wanted and more. She doesn’t want to leave.

But--Killian. How would she convince him? Aren’t married couples supposed to do things as a team--supposed to want the same things? What if--?

She closes her eyes, breathing in and out...and in and out, before she opens the car door, stepping outside into the sun. There’s no use in panicking about it now, not before she knows how he will react. Besides, the last text she’d received, or at least read, from him told her that he’d be down at the docks, and by the sound of it, he’ll stay there awhile. Feeling a little lighter, she grabs her purse and jogs up to her front door, trying the knob. It’s unlocked.

_...oh._

Slower now, she swings open the door, listening to the hinges creak. The house is quiet, but several lights are on. Killian is home. 

She closes the door behind her, locking it, and tosses her keys in the dish on the table in the entryway. Regina had gotten her that old dish for her last birthday; Henry had painted it blue when he was in grade school. It’s one of her most treasured gifts, nevermind that Killian had once said that it made the foyer look childish. After stepping out of her shoes, she pokes her head into the sitting room. 

Killian is seated on the edge of the couch, holding a glass halfway filled with rum loosely at the rim. He doesn’t look up. Steeling herself, Emma walks into the room, already preparing an apology in her head. It’s not fair to him that she ignored his calls all day. What kind of wife does that? Settling on the couch next to him, she decides to break the silence.

“It’s a little early in the day for drinking, don’t you think?” She’d meant to sound concerned, maybe a little jesting; but the words come out rather judgemental. 

Killian looks up now, dark eyes narrowed under thick eyebrows. “What would you have me do, Swan? I’ve been trying to reach you all day.” His words are angry and bitter, and Emma finds herself hanging her head.

“I know, I’m sorry. I just wanted to wait to talk to you in person.”

He scoffs a little in response, tilting the glass to his lips. “Well, here we are now. Feel free to talk.”

Emma pulls at her fingers, resisting the urge to crack her knuckles. “I...it’s been a hard day. Henry left, and--”

At this, Killian lifts his good arm and swings it around her shoulders. When he speaks again, his voice is significantly softer. “I know, I know, I’m sorry, love. I was just worried about you, that’s all. You just had me worried.”

Emma leans into the touch, her nerves retreating. He’s fine, they’re fine. Regina doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She puckers her lips and he accepts the invitation, dipping in to kiss her. His lips taste like rum.

The moment doesn’t last long before Killian speaks again, leaning forward to place his empty glass on the coffee table. “So, I suppose we should discuss the move? I’ve started packing up the attic; putting your little knick-knacks in boxes and such.”

Emma sits up straighter, eyes wide. “You’ve already started packing?”

Her husband turns back to face her, placing a placating hand--and hook--on her shoulders, and she tenses under his touch. “Emma, love, we don’t have all the time in the world.”

Emma shrugs his hand off of her, watching as his face hardens. “But I said--”

“I thought you said you _wanted_ to move.” Killian tells her, covering her trembling hand with his calloused one.

For a moment, Emma almost caves. She sees herself holding his hand, agreeing to his false memory, kissing him on the cheek, and packing up her clothes--

\--but...no. Emma’s conversation with Regina earlier resurfaces in her mind, and for the first time in awhile, she stands her ground. “No, _you_ did.” She reminds him, setting her jaw and furrowing her eyebrows. How dare he begin to pack up her own house without her? Prepare for a move she never agreed to?

Killian draws back, scowling deeply. “Swan, we’re supposed to be a team about this.”

“But I don’t want--”

“Think about the _baby_, Emma!”

A fury of emotions bottled up inside of her bursts free, filling her chest, rising up her throat, and then-- “There _**is** no baby! Killian!_” Tears fill her eyes and sting her nose, and she brings her hands to her mouth, choking back a sob.

His face softens, then, and he reaches out to move her hands. “I know. I know, love, and that’s _why_ I want to leave this town,” he presses, bringing her hand to his lips and kissing her knuckles.

Emma swallows roughly, and shakes her head. “But, Killian, listen-! Regina told me that my magic has nothing to do with getting pregnant. We can stay!”

As soon as the words leave her mouth, she realizes her mistake. A dark cloud passes over his features and he drops her hand, standing so quickly the couch shifts backwards. “You talked about our _personal issues_ with somebody else--with _Regina_, of all people?!” He shouts, gesturing wildly with his arms, his face quickly reddening. _“Damn you, Swan!”_

Emma stands too, trying not to feel the slamming in her chest. She knows from experience that this is quickly spiraling out of control. “I needed to talk to _someone_ about it, Hook! This is _killing me!_ And _Regina_ is my best friend, and you know that.”

Hook sucks his teeth and rakes his hand through his unruly dark hair. “You’re right, I _do_ know that, and you persist to spend the majority of your time with that--woman, despite your knowledge of how I feel about her. I _do_ know.”

Emma watches as the sharp tip of his hook swings dangerously close to one of her best couch cushions. The same ball of anger in her chest threatens to come free in response to his treatment of Regina before she swallows it. “But, _Killian,_ what she said was a _good_ thing. We don’t have to move.” The way he talks about Regina makes her sick, but she doesn’t have the strength to fight him on that topic right now. Already, she feels tears threatening her eyes and all she wants to do now is ask for forgiveness before things get worse.

Her calmer words seem to help slightly, but Hook still doesn’t back down from his argument. “Besides the fact that I don’t happen to trust a word that comes out of that witch’s mouth, we’ve tried it your way for the past two years. Let’s try my way. Please?” During his speech, his shoulders had dropped and he’d slowly made his way over to Emma, sweetening it with a small smile.

“I--” Emma begins, glancing at the floor. _He has a point, doesn’t he?_ But she still doesn’t want--

“Come on, love,” Killian coaxes, wrapping his arms around her waist, swaying her a little from side to side. “Come on, let’s try again, love.” 

He leans down and kisses Emma, and she finally parts her lips. _Okay._

They kiss for a little while before Hook grows impatient and pushes them against the wall, becoming more aggressive, slipping his rum-soaked tongue between her teeth. She closes her eyes, letting her head roll against the wall. _Let’s try again. And again. And again._

He finally picks her up and carries her to their bedroom where he mounts her. She spreads her legs obediently, staring at the ceiling. This is fine. They are fine. She is fine.

_Isn’t she?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed! This is a fic where I am delving into much deeper, complicated, important emotions than I have in my earlier works.  
(which I'm planning to post on here soon! I'm new to AO3 but I love it here!)  
The pregnancy issues and abusive relationship tendencies are pretty mature themes (and the reason why I labeled this book Mature), so just be careful reading if you personally feel you need to be. She will leave eventually, promise, and Hook will not be one of our main characters soon enough.
> 
> I'm sure we've all noticed that in the show, Emma's character has been completely broken down since season 5 and the Dark Swan arc. Well, this is me acknowledging it and fixing it. I'm sorry that Hook is being disgusting and controlling. Again, she'll leave this incredibly emotionally abusive relationship eventually; SwanQueen is in the cards, but Emma deserves to heal.
> 
> I would be overjoyed if you sent me a comment to let me know what you think!


	3. Helium-Filled Balloon

A crisp, chilly October day dawns, spilling its rays of sunlight into Regina’s room, peeking through her curtains and spreading across her face as if teasing her, like a child nudging her awake and hoping for breakfast.

Regina comes to slowly, stretching her arms high above her head and making high, undignified squeaking sounds while her hands clench and unclench. She glances beside her, noting her alarm clock. _10:04?_ It’s a Saturday, but she hadn’t meant to sleep in. She’s out of bed and halfway across her room before realizing there’s no boy in the room down the hall for her to rouse and tell to wash up for breakfast. Her palm settles on her forehead, rubbing small circles there as she closes her eyes, still slightly dizzy from changing her orientation too quickly. Henry’s been gone for over a month now, but it hasn’t gotten any easier. Every time she makes dinner, she still sets the table for two before remembering, and she finds herself outside of his door almost every evening to bid him goodnight. When she goes to the grocery store, she sometimes picks up doughnuts or more of his favorite treats. Every time she trips over his shoes near the door, she just stops herself from shouting across the house to pick up after himself. There’s traces of him all over the house--his shampoo in the shower, his jackets in the coat closet, his video games by the TV, his old textbooks in the den.

And every day, Regina has to remind herself that he’s not here. He’s worlds away, living his own adventure--his own story--and she doesn’t know when she’ll see him again. She could hug him again tomorrow, or he might show up on her doorstep in ten years. The not-knowing is part of what kills her.

Regina wraps a robe around herself and moves to the bathroom attached to her master bedroom, starting the shower. As steam rises from the water and clouds the bathroom mirror, she allows her thoughts to wander towards Emma. The blonde has been scarce recently--even more so than usual. Any weekend plans they might make are squandered by the pirate, and Regina frowns as she begins to think she hasn’t seen her since they bumped into each other at Granny’s--and that had been two weeks ago. They’d had a few good texting conversations since then, but even those are fizzling out. One thing’s for certain: Emma is avoiding her.

Regina opens the robe and it slips off of her shoulders before she steps into the steamy mist, the droplets nearly burning her skin. She likes her showers much too hot. She combs her fingers through her dark hair, closing her eyes and feeling tracks of water collect on her eyelashes and the end of her nose before slowly dripping off. 

Her conversation with Emma in her kitchen the day Henry left has been haunting her for weeks. She’s known ever since Emma married that man that he would do his best to break down her walls (and then some)--then build up this new person that Regina could barely recognize, but from what Emma had told her, this is far over the line. Her shampooing becomes more aggressive as she continues to dwell on Emma’s relationship. How dare the pirate so much as _suggest_ that she leave her family? Every time she considers even the possibility of Emma moving away, she feels sick. After everything, Emma has become so important to her--her best friend, her first choice for almost anything. She can’t imagine a reality where Emma doesn’t pester her while she’s working, or where they no longer have semi-weekly lunches, or long, late-night phone calls. Without Henry and without Emma...that’s when Regina will realize just how alone she really is. Though the town has grown to love her and she has many acquaintances and even friends, including Snow--without the two most important people in her life, Regina doesn’t know how she would cope. 

Even as she thinks this, she knows she’s being selfish. This isn’t about _her,_ damn it--it’s about Emma. It’s about how her sorry excuse for a husband treats her, and Regina only knows the small, wallpapered-over version that Emma very rarely gives her: a tiny speck in comparison to an entire universe. What happens behind closed doors, Regina shudders to even imagine. All Regina wants is for Emma to remember her worth and either take control of her relationship, or leave it. Preferably leave it. Regina doesn’t know exactly what goes on in Emma’s home, but her gut tells her it’s unrepairable. It breaks Regina’s heart into a million tiny shards; she can only imagine what sort of pain the blonde is going through--and even if she doesn’t realize she’s hurting now...oh, _god,_ she will eventually. And it will break her.

She reluctantly shuts off the shower and steps out, wrapping herself in a fluffy towel, having made up her mind. She’s going to call Emma today. She _will_ get to the bottom of this.

Still in her towel, she exits her bathroom and picks up her phone plugged in by her nightstand. The lock screen flashes her with a text--_from Emma_. Despite herself, her heart thumps in her chest and her throat nearly chokes her as she slowly sits on the side of her bed. Taking her time, she uses her thumb to unlock her phone and open her messages. 

**Emma:** Granny’s for lunch?

Regina breathes out a long breath, cursing herself for being so foolish. The blood returns to her fingers as she types out a response:

**Regina:** 12:00. Be punctual, dear.

Regina smiles slightly, her mood lifted at the prospect of spending the afternoon with Emma. Emma had reached out to _her_. Moving to her closet, she hurriedly shuffles through shirts and dresses, trying to find something to wear. As she finds herself struggling to choose between two pieces, she frowns. _It’s just Emma._ She pulls a random garment off its hanger and slips into it, hearing her phone chime on the bed.

**Emma:** aren’t I always?

Regina chuckles, shaking her head as droplets from her still-damp hair fall from her strands and splash onto the touchscreen. Emma has never been on time for any event in her life.

**Regina:** you idiot.

\---

Regina arrives at Granny’s at 11:49 A.M., flagging down Ruby and securing a small booth for them in their favorite spot, near the back and next to the window. Regina has noticed that during lunch, when the sun is highest in the sky, it likes to stream through the window and cast itself onto Emma’s hair, revealing strands of light, light blonde, then dirtier blonde near her ears, and the pieces that seem to glow--the goldest, richest yellow she’s ever laid her eyes on. She doesn’t question why she tends to notice this. She’s always been observant. 

She orders herself a coffee--then one for Emma, as an afterthought: by the time she arrives, it will have cooled, and she knows Emma doesn’t like the liquid burning hot--then settles into the booth, allowing her mind to wander once more while she waits for her best friend.

The coffee arrives and Regina drinks hers black this time, enjoying the bitterness on her tongue, feeling more awake with every dainty sip. When Regina sleeps in, although practically speaking, she knows she’s getting more hours of sleep, she somehow feels more tired and sluggish when she awakens. She trains her eyes on the door, but they soon unfocus. She wonders why it had taken Emma so long to contact her. Sure, two weeks is a very short period of time, but in comparison to how much they normally see each other, it had felt like a barren wasteland. Last week, when she had cooked too much chicken for herself, she had picked up her phone to ask Emma if she wanted some leftovers--but the call had gone straight to voicemail. It’s the little things she notices--little kinks in her routine, small happinesses in her day that Emma brings her: a crude text at work, an empty stomach for her cooking, a backrub and a listening ear after a long day--those are the things she finds herself missing. 

The door chimes and Regina is awoken from her trance. Across the diner, Emma is entering, holding the two sides of her leather jacket around her frame to shield against the cold. Regina raises her arm, flagging her down, and Emma walks to her.

“Hey, Gina,” Emma sighs, collapsing into the booth and looking far more tired than Regina had been expecting. “Oooh--coffee.” She stirs in sugar--including a packet more than her usual share--and takes a generous sip.

“Good morn--afternoon,” she corrects herself, watching somewhat concernedly as Emma guzzles her drink. “Sleep well?” She adds sarcastically, watching as Emma glances up and makes a face.

“That obvious?” She sighs, removing her coat and balling it up beside her. Regina watches her biceps tense as she crosses her arms and sets her elbows on the edge of the table. She swallows. Why had that idiot chosen to wear a tank top on a day like today? She’s about to comment on it, but then she takes a moment to look into her green eyes--and though she masks it well with her carefree humor, they’re drenched in sorrow.

“Emma...are you alright?” She asks, reaching across the table to rub her thumb against the back of Emma’s hand.

“I--it’s nothing,” Emma begins as though she had truly meant to tell her, but decided against it at the last moment.

Regina only quirks a brow.

Emma laughs nervously, glassy eyes looking dangerously full. “Damn it, Regina, I can’t keep stuff from you,” she says, voice watery as she breaks contact with Regina’s hand to bring hers to her face, shielding most of it from Regina’s view. “I planned this lunch so I could tell you something, and every time I try, I--”

Regina’s blood suddenly turns to ice. All at once, she has a bad, bad feeling. “Emma,” she begins slowly, looking at her straight in the eye, “you know you can tell me anything. You _know_ that.”

Emma nods rigorously, blinking past tears. In her peripheral, Regina watches as Ruby approaches their booth, notepad in hand, before surveying their body language and slowly backing away. Regina closes her eyes for a moment, sending up a silent thanks.

“Killian and I have been talking, and--”

Regina feels her stomach drop, as if a trap door had opened within her and exposed a bottomless pit. She knows, without Emma even having to say a word, what this is about. All of Regina’s worst fears from the past month had just come true.

“--and we’ve decided, uhm, that we’re going to make the move after all.”

Regina’s eyes close again, this time for a much longer period of time. Her eyelids grate against the deep stinging beneath them, and Regina thinks that if her heart hadn’t broken completely before, it’s certainly finished now. Somehow, hearing Emma say the damned words makes them worse, and Regina finds herself realizing that maybe she’s already known--for much longer than she would ever admit to herself. The moment Emma had distanced herself, she’d had a deep, sinking feeling; one that snaked its way into her dreams and into the very center of her heart. 

And she thinks that maybe Emma has already been gone for far longer than that.

Regina opens her eyes and is met with a face as pale as the sheets on Regina’s spare bed. Forcing a small smile onto her face--but it looks and feels far more like a grimace--she tries to speak past the dryness in her throat. “I see.” 

Emma seems to hear the grit in her voice, because she ducks her head and the hands gripping her ceramic mug are trembling slightly. “Killian just thinks--I mean, we’ve been trying it this way for so long, it’s worth trying somewhere else, isn’t it?” As she speaks, her voice becomes a little stronger, and she lifts her head, as if what she had said was completely reasonable, and not _so obviously_ part of a written script her husband had likely drilled into her. 

Regina just shakes her head, not realizing her tears until they’re trailing down her cheeks, disrupting the makeup she had so painstakingly applied an hour before. “Oh, _Emma_.” 

It’s all she says; all she can make herself say. Even she doesn’t realize that her entire heart had gone out with those words; a strangled, last-ditch effort of a plea to reach the woman she once knew. _Oh, Emma, what happened?_

The other woman feels like a helium-filled balloon, one that Regina is desperately trying grasp before she moves completely out of reach and far, far away, up into the greying sky and _lost,_ without a single soul to tether her. And as she looks into those resigned, dull, dull eyes, Regina feels the string of the balloon slip from her fingertips.

\--- 

Emma knows that Regina is disappointed in her. She bites hard on the inside of her cheek, trying to look anywhere but the tears running down her best friend’s cheeks--tears _she_ had caused. What if Regina was right? What was she--

\--_but_. Emma shakes her head slightly, countless conversations with Killian coming to mind. It’s for the best. It’s their best chance. Their best---

_Killian wraps an arm around her waist, her bare skin twitching as he makes contact with her frame. She’s utterly spent and exhausted, and it’s the middle of the night--all she wants to do is sleep._

_“You awake, love?” He asks, and the tone of his voice, though gentle, makes her think better of ignoring him and pretending to be asleep._

_She turns over slightly, eyes blinking to adjust to the dark. “Yeah,” she murmurs, grimacing when his breath floats a little too near her face. _

_“Do you know why I want a child?” he asks, and Emma feels a thousand-pound weight fall on her chest, tears already stinging her eyes._

_“Killian, I can’t--I don’t want to--” she begins, until he shushes her, rubbing his hand up and down her bare arm, his rings cold against her skin. She shuts her mouth. Obedient._

Obedient, _a voice in her mind taunts her._ Obedient, like a dog.

_“I’ve wanted children ever since Milah. We tried for so long, just as we are now, and nothing happened--until Baelfire found my ship, and I thought maybe I could love him as a father. Then he, too, left me.”_

_Emma feels tears prick her eyes, guilt eating her up from the inside. Of course he wants this--of course it’s important to him. _

_She opens her mouth again, but then he’s continuing. “You understand now, don’t you? This is so important to me. I’m a married man, and I want a family. And you, Swan, you, will not deign to give up the comforts of your life here to try to give that to me.”_

_Despite herself, despite knowing what it will entail, she bristles. All she has been doing for the past two years is trying--trying every single night and crying over countless failed pregnancy tests and spreading her legs for countless doctor appointments--how dare he say she hasn’t tried?! “Killian--” she begins, about to state her opinion, but her voice gives out before she can say another word. What has happened to her? Has her obedience really gone so far that she can no longer control it? “I--I try, I am trying,” she babbles, and it’s all she can say. “I’m doing everything I can.” And she is. She’s doing everything she can, taking everything she has away from herself until she sometimes feels like nothing but an empty shell._

_Killian shifts so that he’s higher than her, and Emma suddenly feels far smaller than before. “You’re doing everything but packing your bags, Swan.” He grits out, and Emma feels her blood freeze and her entire body tense._

_“But--”_

_“Listen to me, Swan. We’ve tried it your way. I’ve sat here with my thumbs up my ass for two years, waiting for something to happen. All I’m asking is for one simple thing. I don’t ask for much, do I? Tell me if I do. But the moment I ask for something, something that will more than benefit us both, not to mention our nonexistent_ child, _it’s too much for you.”_

_Emma shakes her head in the dark, tears already trailing down her face and snot leaking out her nose like a damned child. A dog, cowering in a corner with its tail between its hind legs. “No, No, Killian--” she breathes in a shuddered breath, trying not to think about the shame that fills her entire body and her heart in her throat. “I’m sorry,” she croaks out, listening to him shift in bed beside her._

_“Then what is it? Tell me what it is. You’re an amazing woman, Emma, a woman whose best gift to this world is her children, her biggest achievement. Not only are you depriving me, you’re depriving_ yourself._”_

_Emma’s crying in earnest now, every part of herself she’s buried trying and clawing to burst free._ What about the countless lives I’ve saved? _She wants to scream at her husband._ What about my magic, or the men I’ve put behind bars and made society a safer place? Isn’t that worth something? What about me? Aren’t I worth something?

_But she stays silent. Silent, like she always is. Maybe she is worthless. She doesn’t even know who she is anymore._

_But she’s silent for too long--because then,_

_“Answer me! Answer me, damnit! What’s the matter with you?!”_

_A sob breaks free then, and she claps a hand over her mouth, her heart feeling as though it might burst out of her chest. He doesn’t like it when she cries like this, especially during a fight. “I--” she forces out, hating the way her voice cracks. She cringes, pulling her knees to her chest as she hears him get out of bed completely. “I don’t know, okay! I don’t know!”_

_And what is wrong with her? Why does her body refuse to give them a child? Why won’t she agree to something as simple as a move? God knows the foster child inside of her is used to moving around--why has she been so goddamned_ stubborn_? _

_“You really want to fix this?” He asks her, and it’s as if he’s doing her a favor. _

_And Emma accepts it as one, nodding her head and a squeak escaping from her mouth, hating herself more with every passing fraction of a second._

_“Then pack a bag. Pack one right now, so I know you’re not fucking with me.”_

_Emma lets another sob escape, and she closes her eyes, squeezing them shut, and wishes suddenly for a life--a life more than this, maybe one she already had but had lost somewhere along the way. The voices inside her scramble at her, scream at her to get out of bed and run_\--run away, you idiot--_but her fear resists them, and then all of the sudden, the voices leave her, retreating all at once, as if giving up on her, their last attempt to save her, and now she’s left all alone with the empty husk she’s created._

_“Bloody hell, Swan, get out of bed and pack a_ bloody _bag!!” He shouts, and this time, Emma gets up, her entire body shaking violently as she stumbles across the floor and begins throwing garments of clothing into a duffel bag she’d found deep within her closet, groping in the dark. Cowering, shivering, afraid, and obedient._

_And that, she thinks--or doesn’t think, perhaps only her subconscious does--is when the biggest piece of Emma Swan died._

The conversation with Killian from last night enters and exits her mind within the frame of a few seconds--but goosebumps still erupt over her arms and the back of her neck, and she holds back tears from the shame the memory brings her. Even now, though, looking back on it, she feels almost numb. This morning, when she had woken, she’d almost forgotten it had happened; Killian had kissed her cheek and made her breakfast, telling her how proud he was of her and how much he loved her and how excited he was for their future. Emma had basked in the praise, and the night before had nearly escaped her mind--until she’d climbed the stairs and saw the mess of her closet, and the overstuffed duffel bag in the corner.

The moment she saw it, she turned towards the bathroom and vomited the entire breakfast she had just eaten, holding her knees to her chest on the cold bathroom tile and letting the tears pour down her cheeks--until she had gotten up, washed her face, and resolved never to cry about it again. She’d never felt more weak in her life until that moment--and she never wanted to feel that way again. She’d picked up her phone, texted Regina, and plastered a smile onto her face. 

All is well.

But as Regina looks across the table at her with an expression filled with pity and mournfulness and as her lips tremble--just ever-so-slightly, Emma feels her resolve begin to crumble. Just a crack. She’ll miss this woman. She’ll miss her most out of everything and everyone she’s leaving behind--and the ache in her heart doesn’t even begin to cover the despair she’ll feel when she realizes she’s all alone in her new home. _Without Regina._

But then Regina’s standing, sending her some broken form of congratulations with a watery smile, and she’s making her polite exit. And as Emma looks across at the empty booth, her resolve chips a little more and she begins to feel the weight of her loss.

\---

Regina listens to the waves crash against the shore and the seagulls cry overhead in a grey, cloudy sky. Sitting on the grass just before the line of the sand, she closes her eyes and tries to relax, focusing on the salty twinge in the air and the scent that seems to follow autumn wherever it goes. 

An hour before, she’d fled the diner after hearing Emma’s news. She hadn’t meant to leave Emma there; she’d fully intended to mask her pain, straighten her shoulders, order a Caesar salad, and allow the lunch to continue, as if her entire world had not crashed around her shoulders, leaving nothing but a square of shaking, crumbling ground just big enough for her feet.

But she’d suddenly felt suffocated as she looked across the booth at Emma and her dull, lifeless eyes--Emma, who hadn’t said a word since she’d attempted to defend a choice that she so obviously hadn’t made--Regina couldn’t breathe.

So now, she’s out by the water, closing her eyes and focusing on her breathing, trying not to think about Emma. She’ll have plenty of time for that later--too much time. For now, _breathing._

She sits there for awhile; she’s not sure how long, but by the time she opens her eyes, the sun is in a different spot in the sky, beginning to peek through some of the clouds. She hears a rustle behind her and turns, trying not to show her mixture of surprise and happiness when she sees Emma.

“I thought I might find you here,” the blonde says, and she’s trying her hand at a weak jest; the first plank of wood to building the bridge over the chasm their last conversation had put between them.

Regina just smiles, not upset that she knows. Regina likes to come here when she’s feeling helpless and small and afraid. It’s near the spot Henry’s old castle playhouse used to be--the one she had so stubbornly and cold-heartedly smashed to pieces all of those years ago. Somehow, though, the place brings her a sort of peace. Emma knows this; she and the blonde have had many conversations here; whispering dark secrets that no other soul on this earth could know--confessions, admissions, stories that even they themselves had almost blocked out of their own memories--and when they leave, it’s an unwritten agreement to never speak of those things again. So, Regina just smiles and nods, waiting for Emma to sit down. She does. 

“I...I’m sorry,” Emma’s saying now, her voice breaking, and even in the weakness of her voice, she sounds so much more like the Emma that Regina once knew that she lifts her head, staring into those wet, green eyes, and feeling as though her heart might burst out of her chest.

Regina shakes her head, ignoring the tears that leak from her eyes. “Don’t you dare apologize to me, Emma Swan,” she tells her, her own voice lifting and falling over the syllables. “Is this what will make you happy?” She asks her concerning the move, fully serious, and hinging the entire next portion of her words on the answer she receives.

Emma gazes out to sea, eyes glistening as her hair whips around her face. “I--” she begins, her voice nearly lost in the wind. “I think--maybe--”

Regina turns towards her again, covering Emma’s cold hands with her own, and waiting until the blonde looks at her. “Because if this is what you want, Emma, I will do everything I can to support you.”

Emma just nods, bursting into tears, and the two women lean forward and hug each other, long, warm, and tight--both of their shoulders racking with sobs for entirely different reasons.

But then again--maybe not; maybe their reasons are not so very different at all. There’s something hanging between them, something neither of them even know exists, but is the very thing that is tearing them apart.

A red-hot, searing, passionate flash of _love._

\---

Regina keeps true to her word. During the span of the next month, she helps Emma, in every sense of the word, in any way she needs. She helps her pick through her clothes and donate the ones she no longer wears to downsize; she shows her how to fold towels, helps her pack boxes, helps her carry them to various locations; helps her move away, and out of her life. And every single day it kills her--but every single day she does it, because that's what she promised she would do, and it's all she can do now to support her. Emma still feels so far away and so far out of reach--this is all she can do, her last impression she can make for Emma's memory. 

So she sets her jaw and finds a way to smile, ignoring Killian’s various creative ways to provoke her: scowling when she and Emma erupt into giggles over old photos, and at other times, smirking smugly at her as if he can read her mind. _I'm taking her away,_ he seems to mock her. _And there's nothing you can do about it._

And as she helps fit the last box into Emma's car and gives her one last hug, a palm wrapped against the back of her head and whispering how much she cares about her into her ear, and the _good lucks_ and the _be safes,_ she manages not to cry. She doesn't even cry as Emma squeezes her back and sniffs quietly before she gets into her car and starts the engine. 

But as Regina watches the blonde’s yellow Bug drive away and out of view, she allows her tears to fall. And as she stands in the middle of the road, the cool November wind slicing at her cheeks and sneaking its way under her layers, she truly believes that she will never see Emma Swan again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, super long, VERY heavy chapter here. Chapters will be extremely varying in length because I just tend to go with the flow when it comes to formatting chapters. 
> 
> I feel that I should probably address the extremely sexist things Hook said in this chapter. It was likely very offensive and possibly triggering to you, and I just want to make it very clear that he is painted in a negative light, and this behavior will ultimately NOT be rewarded; he is a horrible person for saying these things. Emma will get better, promise. Again, these are mature abusive themes that determined the rating of this book. Please be cautious.
> 
> The introduction for this story is pretty much over, so we can move on to the time jump and Season 7-centered stuff. Thank you for your patience.
> 
> Please let me know what you think! Comments make my entire day.


	4. You're Beautiful

**STORYBROOKE, MAINE, 2022.**

Breeze flows through the open windows of Regina’s mansion, sending a mild chill through her kitchen and erupting gooseflesh over her arms as she bites into a strawberry. In the early days of May, summer is finally beginning to grace Storybrooke’s eager residents, and, delighted by the newfound warmth, Regina has perhaps prematurely cracked most of the windows in her house. 

Regina places her knife in the sink and sits at the island with her fresh fruit salad, a new Saturday morning breakfast routine as of late. Despite the peace and solitude of her late morning, her heart once again yearns for company. Unbidden, her mind’s eye presents her with an image of Emma, and she squeezes her eyes tightly shut, shaking her head with a firmness that surprises even herself. It’s been four years--when will she ever find a way to let her go?

Four years isn’t exactly fair, she knows; it hadn’t exactly been a clean break. The last time she’d seen the blonde had been at the town line after Regina willingly helped Emma pack up her entire life--because that was the only way she knew she could show her support and give her a shoulder to lean on--but they hadn’t stopped talking, not right away.

After Regina watched the yellow bug disappear from the magic shielding the town and allowed herself to cry, she’d walked home slowly, instead of magicking herself into her room, forcing herself to feel and work through the complicated hurt Emma had left in her wake. She hadn’t needed to wait long before the blonde reached out to her. Regina laid in bed that night, tears stinging her eyes, when her phone buzzed and it had been a call from Emma, telling her they made it to their new apartment safely, and thanked her, as Regina cried silent tears all throughout Emma’s staged excitement as she explained the layout to her--but their call had quickly become more enjoyable as they fell into their usual easy routine of talking about anything and everything, and suddenly, it wasn’t hard to imagine that Emma really was down the street, and she hadn’t left her at all, and maybe Regina really was fine--but then the call ended, and Regina had been left empty once more. 

But then Emma had called her again the next night, and then the night after that, and somehow, those phone calls had become a lifeline for Regina, the best part in her day to look forward to, the moment she could pretend Emma wasn’t lost to her and she wasn’t so terribly, hopelessly _alone_. And, judging by Emma’s behavior, the calls played a similar role for her--until they didn’t anymore.

Nightly calls turned to weekly calls, which turned into monthly calls, which became holiday calls, stretched thin between the months, and then the years, and then nothing, nothing, _nothing_ at all. By the end--_oh god, the end for them_\--the happy, emotional, lifeline phone calls became stilted and almost awkward, with chasms of time between the two women and somehow monumentally less to say, and even though Regina vehemently hated herself for it, she found herself almost dreading those same beautiful phone calls that had turned ugly with time and the constant look behind shoulders for an increasingly angry husband. Until finally, Emma stopped calling, and Regina wasn’t forced to answer the horrible question of whether she would pick up the phone next time.

The loss of contact has in no way stopped Regina of thinking of her, however; wondering if her hair was still long or whether she had cut it, whether the color had completely drained from her face or if there was still even the smallest glimmer of light behind those sad, sad eyes. She pictures her with a baby bump, pictures her at a baby shower with no family to attend, pictures Hook with a smug, accomplished smile on his face all the while. Regina realizes she’s been clenching her fork much too tightly and loosens her grip, chewing a bite of cantaloupe and sternly telling herself to let it go. _Let her go._

Regina takes a shuddering breath and brings her bowl to the sink, calming her mind as she washes her dishes, inhaling the clean, fresh scent of the Dawn soap under her fingers. She glances at the calendar on the adjacent kitchen wall and bites her lip. In a few days, it’ll be the four-year anniversary of the day Henry left home--a clean break with his past life--and disappeared behind the portal. Regina sometimes wonders if that portal swallowed a part of herself along with her son, and now she’s forced to squeeze her eyes shut to halt the stinging beneath her eyelids. Now, she’s almost entirely used to his absence; his bedroom door has been shut for a few years, his shoes are put away, his shampoo stored away in the bathroom cabinet. Many of the reminders are gone, but a hole in her heart remains, one rendered completely unrepairable, one Regina is still learning how to live in spite of.

It would help, wouldn’t it, if there was a day Regina could count down towards, a moment in time she knew she would feel him in her arms again? A when, an _ever?_ She shakes her head again, her longer dark hair swaying around her head. She can’t think like that, she knows, previous therapy sessions entering her mind. Archie coaches her to be realistic, but never to ignore the facts that blend into hope and instead give into despair--Henry had _promised_ that he’d come home, and Archie had leaned forward in his chair. 

_“Hold onto that. Breathe that. Believe him. Your son doesn’t make promises he doesn’t intend to keep. If he is able to, Regina, he will find a way to contact you. If he doesn’t, then you know what it means.”_

Regina almost wants to smile. Archie is almost _too_ honest for his own good, but Regina welcomes it. So, she continues to live her life, accepting the need to find a way without both of the most important people to her. Regina has never been, never will be weak. She finds a way to not just get out of bed in the morning, but to make it behind her, and a way to laugh and smile and exist as her own person.

But _god_, she misses them.

She unplugs the sink and listens as the sudsy water struggles thickly down the drain in a gulping, strangling sound. She rinses her sponge and sets it on the edge of the sink. She _is_ okay, isn’t she?

She’s startled by the sound of a light rapping against her front door, and she stills, wondering if she’d imagined it--she combs her mind and is unable to think of a single person she’s expecting. It couldn’t even be Snow--she, David, and Neal had taken a temporary trip to the Enchanted Forest to allow Neal to see where he would have grown up in another life and to introduce him to the culture, and she’s not expecting them back for another six months.

But then--the knocking is back, a little stronger and more confident this time, and Regina turns to check her reflection in the microwave door, rubbing her painted lips together and smoothing down her hair before drying her hands on a dish towel and striding towards the door.

Squaring her shoulders, she pushes down the latch and swings open the door--

\--_no._

It’s not possible. She stands utterly still, her very breath halted as she takes in the man in front of her. It’s Henry--_it has to be_\--but the Henry she knew left her only four years ago, and this one stands before her as a stranger.

The conflict within her passes through all within a matter of seconds--she’ll always recognize her son no matter how much time has passed, but the impossibility of it all baffles her, and as she looks into the eyes of the very man she had been trying so vainly to live without, the man she doubted if she’d ever see again, and the man who is so impossibly different--she can’t breathe. She can’t form a single coherent thought or a sentence, so she stands, completely dumbstruck, both of them only staring until the pressure builds to a breaking point.

The man opens his mouth, and with it confirms her simultaneous greatest wish and greatest fear. “Hi, Mom,” he says, voice breaking across the syllables, and only then does Regina begin to cry. 

Because there’s her son, her little prince whom she’d missed so deeply and terribly that it’d left a horrible gaping hole in her heart, and all she can do is sob. Henry moves toward her first, tall and muscular and broad-shouldered, and they collide, Regina curling her fingers into the unfamiliar material of his foreign leather and riding pants appropriate for the Enchanted Forest. 

“Henry,” she whispers, her voice completely broken, and she feels his strong arms tighten around her.

“I’m home,” he tells her, curling his palm against the back of her head, smoothing down her hair and leaning down to press several kisses to the crown of her head. “I know it’s been so, so long, but I promised I would come home to you.”

Regina pushes back slightly, confusion lining her face. “It’s…” she begins, trying again when hardly any sound comes out, her heart feeling as though it’s about to burst out of her chest. “It’s only been four years,” she tells him, and only five minutes ago, she’d felt as though four years was a monumentally long time, but now looking at her adult son, it suddenly feels as though that period of time is far, far, far too short. 

Henry immediately blanches, and he stumbles back. “Four years?” He repeats, his voice suddenly extremely small and far higher than it had been moments before.

Regina feels a wave of nausea cover her, her stomach turning over violently. “Henry…” she begins slowly, “how long has it been for you?” Her mind presents her with an image of Gideon, Belle and Gold’s son who, six years ago, had been taken as an infant to the Black Fairy’s realm where time moves differently, and had come home only days later fully grown. Her stomach turns again. _Time moves differently in other realms._

Henry pauses for a moment, as if he’s counting. “I think...thirteen?” He mutters, glancing behind him for a moment before seeming to remember Regina and turning back towards her. “Oh, god--Mom--”

He swoops in again as Regina’s world spins. She looks into his face, and it all makes sense--too much sense. Henry had been eighteen only four years ago, and now--her mind doing the math for her though she resists it--thirty-one, far, far too soon. Except for him, he’d lived an entire thirteen years away, no shorter than the four long years she’d endured at home, or than it would have been had he spent thirteen years in Storybrooke.

“Henry,” she says again, cupping his face in her hands and fighting back tears in order to see him more clearly. “You’re _beautiful_.” He grins, somewhat embarrassed, the tips of his ears tinging pink, and Regina finds herself overjoyed in a sense that some things never change. 

Henry laughs then, a deep, throaty chuckle and covers her hands with his own. “I’ve missed you so much, mamá.” They quietly embrace for a few moments more, the breeze from the open door engulfing them in a hug of its own, blowing through hair and fabric, sweetening the air. Henry draws back this time, his face a confusing mix of nerves and love and excitement. “Mom, I need to tell you something,” he opens slowly, watching her face to gauge her expression.

“What is it, my little prince?” She reaches up to his face, running her fingers through his brown hair, and watching him break out into a reminiscent grin that looks so much like himself but with the wisdom and wistfulness from all of the years she missed.

He gives her one last little smile, the kind he reserves only for her, and turns toward the open doorway again. “You can come out now,” he calls, and Regina’s heart leaps into her throat.

A stunning Latina woman walks inside a little timidly, dressed in similar leather, her hand resting on the sword at her hip. Her curly brown hair is pulled back into a low ponytail, and she glances around the house before siding up next to Henry. “I know you told me your mom is a Queen, but this is unlike any palace _I’ve_ ever seen,” she says to him, and they share a quiet laugh before turning to face her. 

“Ella, meet my badass mother. Mom, this is my wife, Ella.”

\---

_ **THE ENCHANTED FOREST, TEN YEARS AGO.** _

_The wind blows through Henry's hair, becoming more aggressive as he picks up speed. The sharpened air stings his eyes and dries his lips, but he can't help but whoop with a sense of delight and freedom, shifting his motorcycle into a higher gear as he speeds across the hoof-paved landscape of the forest trail. He moves with the bike, following the path expertly. He’s moved around a lot since he left home three years ago, but he's stuck around this kingdom for the past few months; long enough to have grown well-acquainted with this particular trail. He has more than a few burdens on his mind, but right now, he’s enjoying the ride to the fullest, inhaling the pine tree scent and ducking low branches. _

_He glances down at his speedometer for a few seconds, knowing to shift slightly to the right in the next clearing--and then he hears a gasp. _

_He glances up a moment too late, watching as a figure on a horse barrels towards him in the opposite direction. He curses, squeezes the brake with all the strength in his fist, and jerks the handlebars to the left just as the horse halts only a few feet in front of him, throwing its rider into the adjacent clearing. _

_Henry’s bike handles the abrupt stop well enough, considering--it falls onto its side and he collides with the ground, but he can tell there’ll be no lasting damage. He scrambles to his feet and rushes over to the clearing, snagging the horse with the reigns as does so. If the rider’s horse ran off too, Henry would feel even worse than he does right now. _

_“Shit. I'm so sorry, I looked down for_ one second_\--” he begins, then looks down. A woman is sprawled in the grass and flowers, the scent and color and movement of the hyacinths kissing the air. Her brown waves surround her head like a crown, her chest rising and falling as she gathers air back into her lungs. “So...sorry.” He repeats, this time slowly in a state of almost awe, as he gives her space to find her footing. _

_She rises, gathers her thoughts, then gasps. “Kaladian!”_

_Henry bobs his head and passes her the reigns. “Here.”_

_She grabs them quickly--her gloved fingers brushing against Henry’s--and gently, though firmly, guides her horse backwards while never dropping Henry from her line of sight._

_“Are you alright?” he tries again, soft green eyes expressing his regret while searching the woman’s reserved facial features for traces of forgiveness and even companionship. Throughout the years on his own, he’d gained both friends and enemies, but recently he’s lost more allies, and safety in numbers sounds appealing to him. _

_Her guarded, sharp eyes stare back at him for a few moments, mouth opening and closing as though she’s deciding his character. Finally, she slips into a smirk so small Henry nearly misses it. “I feel as though I was just thrown from my horse because some idiota and his beast did not watch where he was going.” _

_As she speaks, her voice becomes stronger and her accent thicker, and Henry, though at first chagrined, finds himself smiling in mild confusion. “My...beast?”_

_The woman cocks her head towards the road. “Your headless horse.”_

_Henry breaks into a laugh--not a condescending one, but one that is truly amused and thoroughly enchanted with the woman in front of him. “That would be my motorcycle.”_

_She only cocks a brow, the smirk on her lips becoming a permanent feature. _

_Henry’s heart picks up speed as he continues to laugh softly, watching as the woman collects her reigns and seems to ready her leave._

_“Wait,” he begins, nearly breathless as she turns to look at him once more, no blame in her eyes. “What’s your name?”_

_A flash of panic flickers across her face, masked well but not unnoticed by Henry’s observant nature, and she pauses--not long, but long enough. “...Lilith.”_

_Henry raises his eyebrows along with a halfway-impressed scoff. “Right. I believe you.”_

_She turns quickly, mounting her horse and staring back at him, aloof and reserved once more. “Why wouldn’t you?”_

_Henry crosses his arms and squints up at her. Her jaw is set and strong and proud. “Your name isn’t Lilith.”_

_The woman tosses her head to tame the curls shielding her eyes. “That may be, but what does it matter to you? I have an identity to protect, and I will never see you again.”_

_“Are you in some sort of trouble?”_

_She pauses._

_“I know that look of falling in with the wrong people, especially around here. Maybe I can help you.”_

_Henry watches as she considers it; her carefully guarded face motionless as she turns the offer over in her mind. A seed of pride plants itself in his stomach as he waits. He’s obviously made the correct assumption. _

_“Unless you know how to get out from under the mercy of Doctor Facilier, you’re wasting your time.” Deeper in the forest, a twig snaps, and the woman tenses, her eyes widening and her face draining of its former color. Henry reaches in his belt for his gun, holding it steady as he moves noiselessly across the clearing towards the source of the noise. _

_A shot echoes around them, and a moment later, Henry’s walking back with a rabbit hanging from his fist. The woman is still there, her horse unshaken from the bullet._

_Henry holds up the animal with a smile. “Peace offering? Found some dinner.”_

_She considers it a moment, then climbs down. “Fine, you win.” Then, glancing down at the gun in his hand, “Who are you?”_

_Henry chuckles, stooping down to begin collecting kindle for their fire. “My name is Henry. I’m from another realm.”_

_Their eyes connect, emerald and honey shining as they share each other’s space and silently decide, in that moment, to trust each other. “My name is Ella. Cinderella.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a shorter chapter this time! The reunion will continue in the next chapter.
> 
> I'll be telling Henry's story while he was away in flashback scenes, and we will stay in this time period otherwise. Henry's backstory will have meaning and consequences for what's about to occur in Storybrooke, so stay tuned!
> 
> Please drop me a comment if you enjoyed.


	5. Wonder of a Child

Breeze continues to filter through the open front door, swirling around them and picking up Regina’s strands, cooling her heated face as a contradicting mix of panic and pride and love and sadness surges within her. Her heart squeezes in her chest, pulsing so painfully that she feels if she were to reach inside and take the organ into her hands, it would be bloated and sore.

“_Henry,_” she whispers barely audibly without hardly realizing it, then glancing from his shy smile to their joined hands, she shakes herself from her trance and smiles at the woman--_her son’s wife_\--and takes her other hand both of her own. “It's so good to meet you,” she tells her, ignoring the waver in her voice.

“Likewise,” Ella says politely, but then she smiles widely and steps forward to hug Regina tightly. “Henry’s told me so much about you.”

The contact catches Regina off guard briefly, but her arms wrap around the other woman and she relaxes against her embrace. “Thank you,” she whispers in her ear, “thank you so much for taking care of him.”

When their contact breaks and Regina wipes her eyes, she notices Henry reaching his arm out of the door and coaxing someone to come out. The pit of her stomach plummets down a flight of stairs and there’s a wave-like sensation over her head, as though she's submerged herself in a pool of cold water. 

A small hand grasps Henry’s, and he steps further inside with a young girl with long dark hair and tan skin and a pink blouse. Her wide eyes wander around the spacious foyer, then lock with Regina’s wet ones. She grasps Henry’s hand tighter, retreating slightly so that his body is partially covering hers. 

He crouches to her level, giving her a quick kiss on the forehead. “Go on, it’s okay,” he whispers, but Regina catches it. As she looks at them, she knows. She knows without Henry having to say a single word. 

And she doesn't know how to handle it. 

But in that moment, her heart softens even further, her eyes burning, her mouth in a quivering smile, and all at once, all she wants is the girl in her arms. The girl starts towards her, with Henry's gentle hand on her back, and when Henry looks up, Regina's eyes meet with his. 

He nods. 

“Hi,” the girl says softly, smiling a little shyly but her big eyes already so full of love. 

“Mama, this is my little girl. Lucy.” He tells her, and Regina, though she already knew, claps a hand over her mouth and lets out a quiet sob before she drops to her knees and collects Lucy into her arms. She’s tall for a girl her age.

“You're beautiful, _nieta,_” Regina whispers, and Lucy giggles into her shoulder. 

“I've been wanting to meet you for my whole life,” she tells her, squirming free from her grasp and beginning to talk faster and more freely, her eyes bright and sparkling as she shows off her gap-toothed smile. “Daddy used to tell me bedtime stories about you almost every night. You're the Queen, right?” 

Regina opens her mouth to answer, smiling so widely her cheeks are beginning to ache, warm tears trickling down her face.

But then Lucy’s gasping softly and turning back to her father. “Am I supposed to curtsy or something?”

Henry laughs, full and deep, and runs a loving hand through his daughter’s hair. “I think she’ll let you off the hook this time, Luce.”

Regina glances between the three of them, her son’s little, perfect, _beautiful_ family, and all she can do is laugh and cry and breathe deeply through the pulsing of her beating heart. She rises from the floor--the rushing in her ears so intense and convincing that she feels as though she’s anchored to the bottom of the ocean--and when she lifts her wet, burning eyes to Henry’s, his familiar green ones ground her and keep her sane; and really, isn’t this all she’s ever wanted? She holds her arms out and she and Henry are colliding--but then Lucy’s grabbing at her waist, and Henry gestures for his wife--so the four of them hold onto each other as mother and son cry, and Regina wonders if she’s ever been happier.

But her mind presents her with flashes of blonde hair and goofy grins and leather jackets, and all at once, she wishes fervently for a certain woman to share this reunion with her. 

Emma misses it all.

\---

The golden sunshine of the late morning sun shifting to noon bathes Regina’s living room in yellow squares of light, shining off of her hair and exposing the honey strands in her otherwise raven hair. It warms her as she sits carefully on her couch, tears pricking at her eyes for seemingly endless reasons, but she smiles. 

Upstairs in Henry’s room, shouts of laughter and excited chatter drift down to the lower level and reach Regina’s ears, making out excerpts of conversation as Henry introduces his own family to the boy he was when he lived here. They’re so excited for him, so sharing of his interests, and Regina’s heart is soft, soft, soft. This past hour has been so impossible for her and so wrenching of her heart, but what she sees he has is everything she’s ever wanted for him, and though it hurts in some ways she doesn’t even understand, she gives him that moment upstairs after sharing it with him for awhile. She’d slipped away after squeezing his big hand and padded to her couch to breathe and to give his family privacy for an intimate moment, and drops her stilettos on the rug covering the hardwood so she can tuck her feet underneath her.

Only an hour or so before, Regina felt she’d possessed a real control of her life; one that now she’s not certain was true or merely imagined. It had felt like she accepted Emma’s absence, was somewhat patiently waiting for a rightly-aged Henry to return home, and held a firm control over her own mind and emotions and heart. Looking at that woman now, she notices cracks she hadn’t before, like the longing for the scent of the cologne Emma wore so many years ago and a rosy-cheeked grin after a joke that only she would make--which somehow always managed to make Regina’s own face split into a smile no matter how dark and stormy her mood--and for the touch of Henry’s brown bangs and freckled nose, and for her son and her best friend to sandwich her tightly on the couch to reruns of old sitcoms.

Her heart aches and for a moment of true loneliness, she nearly forgets about the man upstairs until a creak on the ebony laminate floor catches her attention. 

She turns to see Henry standing behind her, both thumbs hooked onto his belt and that same nostalgic little smile pulling at his lips. “Mind if I join you?”

His voice is soft but low, and the foreignness of it coupled with the deep longing within her for him to do just that forms a ball in her throat, and she bobs her head almost frantically, unable to speak.

He walks to her left, and as he moves, she notices for the first time a distinctive limp in his step as he favours his right leg. The roll in his gait intrigues as well as saddens her as yet another reminder of the time she had missed with her son; the extent of the limp seems to be caused from something more than a simple, carefree accident such as a child taking a tumble down the stairs. The failure to know about an injury this serious crushes the mother inside Regina. For Henry’s entire life as a child and teenager, she knew how and when and where he injured himself--what’s more, she was nearly exclusively the one to pick up the pieces and nurse him back to health--and now, she finds herself biting her tongue, questioning whether or not she should even mention the limp to him or ask about it. In a frightening moment of uncertainty, she realizes that she doesn’t know who her son really is anymore, or how to approach him on certain issues, or even what his preferences are.

The restless ocean of her thoughts enter and exit her mind quickly but painfully, and when he sits on the cushion beside her, she sees the slightest hint of relief in his face as he lowers himself down on his left leg. The couch sinks to accept their combined weight, and he leans back onto the decorative pillows, breathing out slowly and relaxedly, closing his eyes for the briefest of moments. Regina uses it to look him over, just as she had been in the foyer and again in his bedroom, but in the solitude of just the two of them, the way it used to be, it feels different, almost slower and lazier, as if she gets to look without the fear of the moment being taken from her too soon. And, she thinks with a curve of her lips covering her dry mouth, those same thick eyelashes brushing against his skin as he rests is not so very different than the brilliant, dark bands of lashes she would admire while he slept as an infant. That same infant that grew to be a small child, one who would look at her with those wide green eyes--only a few years old but the first person for over two decades in Regina’s life who had looked at her with _love._ When he woke himself with his cries in the darkness of the night, and Regina had rushed in to give him all the comfort she possessed and more, and he _looked at her,_ he was the first human being in far, far too long that hadn’t seen her as an _Evil Queen_ at all, one who was capable of terrible things--one who had tortured, even killed--to that wonder of a child, she was nothing more to him than his _mother;_ and to both of them, that was everything. He had saved her. 

Hot tears spring to her eyes and she bites the inside of her cheek, in a vain attempt to halt the quivering of her lips. His eyes open into slits and he rolls his head from his slouched position against the couch to look at her. She nearly tells him to fix his posture before she stops herself, and wants to laugh almost as much as she wants to cry. Her adult son’s posture is hardly the most important thing to address, and yet the same mother she’s always been fights against her restraints.

“Are you alright?” He asks her, and for the first time, she notices the effect of over a decade spent in the Enchanted Forest on her son’s speech. The slight elegance of his tone and words disorients her in a way, but also pulls at her heart because it’s just another trait that reminds her of herself. However, when he seemingly gives himself a moment to think about the question he’d just asked, he winces, and tacks on a phrase that sounds much more like the teenaged boy she remembers. “Dumb question.”

She nearly denies his concern, rushing to protect him from her weaknesses as she always had, smiling as carefully and happily as she can--and she _is_ happy--but all at once, she decides to shed her skin. She doesn’t stop the mounting tears in her eyes from spilling over; and once they do, her lips pull back and a gasp of air escapes her mouth, and she doesn’t have time to register anything before he sides up next to her and drapes a heavy arm over her shoulders. She drops her head onto his shoulder and her tears wet the leather as she finally allows herself to cry and to _feel_ deeply for the first time in months. In time, her hiccuping sobs subside and as the unfamiliar roughness of Henry’s hand rubs up and down her arm, she does her best not to dwell on the fact that he’s the one comforting _her,_ but the thought refuses to leave her mind once it enters it. She raises her head, cheeks reddened and eyes even more so, shaking her head as Henry looks her over in obvious concern. “Sorry,” she whispers through an unsure chuckle, and wonders when her son had become a stranger to her. Four years ago, they’d sat on this same couch after several action films and had talked and laughed late into the night, and now, even as love radiates from him and her heart aches for him, everything is different.

But even as she unconsciously shrinks from him, the same boy he’s always been doesn’t stop rubbing her arm or shy away. He only holds her closer and shakes his head as his eyes seek to connect with hers, and she gets lost inside of them. “You have nothing to apologize for,” he tells her, more serious than she’s ever seen him, and she’s unable to stop herself from nodding under his intense, determined gaze. “If anything, it should be me apologizing.” He sighs and rakes his free hand through his hair, settling farther back into the couch before continuing, suddenly looking far more tired. “I had no idea time was moving differently in Storybrooke. I can’t imagine how this must feel for you--four years is a - a _blip_ in the life I lived over there. And every day I missed you, and every day I felt so guilty that I couldn’t come home to you, but I had _built_ something over there, and I made a family, and you _should have been there_ for all of that, but there was no way to come home, and it - it wasn’t safe.”

Regina’s heart and eyes soften as she listens; every part of her had been so thirsty for information and his story, and now that she’s hearing the surface of it, she wants so desperately to let him know that she’s so--overwhelmingly--proud of him, but _god,_ she wishes she could have been there with him. She imagines the stars in his eyes after meeting his future, him standing at the altar and kissing his bride for the first time as a married man, finding out he’s about to be a father and meeting his little girl for the first time--and she missed it all. 

But her pride is paralyzing and her love is deep and she can only feel happy for him. Happy for the life that he created for himself and the love that he found, and a silent, awing thankfulness that he managed to find his way home again. She shifts so her head treats his shoulder like a pillow, and a shot of nostalgia slices through her; she wants to cover him like a blanket and shield him from his guilt and the new pain and anxieties that he’s gained in all the years that he matured without her; the responsibilities and strains of his adult life and things that she wishes so fervently that she could know but doesn’t; but trust her son to pull her closer to him and rest his chin on the crown of her head.

“I missed you,” he says, and it’s simple, but it’s everything.

“I missed you,” she echoes through a broken whisper and she laughs and cries and laces her fingers through his, because the words don’t come close to portraying the depth of the stormy sea and dark foamy waters of the emotions within her, but it’s a start.

\---

It takes another hour and nearly thirteen minutes--she’d counted--for Emma to come up in conversation. She’s preparing lunch for herself and her son’s family and they’re gathered in the kitchen--Lucy has just bitten into a ripe strawberry and giggles when juice sprays onto her nose--and Henry is thinking out loud, making plans for the next few days.

“...and we gotta go see my mom --” he glances up and winks at Regina, before clarifying that he means his _“other mother;”_ and she’s grateful that for all that he sees, he hadn’t caught the pain in her eyes and the blanch in her face at the mention of Emma. He turns to Ella and smirks, curling an arm around her small waist. “--who I know you’ll love. God, you two are way too similar, and you’ve never even met.”

Ella sighs, pulling away from him playfully and widening her eyes as she watches him reach for her wildly. “_Sé que sé,_ you’ve told me so much about this _Savior mother_ of yours,” she squints her eyes at him, their own joke showing freely in their expressive faces, and they both laugh.

“What? You’re sick of my stories now?” He grins, swooping in and dipping her in his arms, diving down and planting a purposely loud kiss on her lips.

Regina looks on at their antics, a small smile on her lips and warm, heavy blood pulsing through her veins. Lucy turns towards her with a grimace, but there’s a light shining in her eyes. “They do this all the time. They’re _so_ gross.” 

Regina smiles down at her, combing her fingers absently through her silky long hair. She doesn’t even realize she’s doing it, but then Lucy is snuggling closer to her and Regina’s heart feels a sudden pang for this child; she realizes all at once she would do anything for her granddaughter, would fight a thousand wars and move mountains just to make sure she grows up safe and loved, never losing the innocence in her sparkling dark eyes. But, as she watches Henry prowl playfully towards Lucy’s chair and pick her up and tickle her mercilessly as revenge for her grimaces and fake retching, she thinks maybe her parents are doing a perfect job making sure of that on their own.

Lucy shrieks and Henry puts her down, but she stays against his solid frame in his arms. “_I’m_ not sick of your stories, Daddy,” she supplies, sticking out her tongue at her mother, who promptly returns the same expression.

“Yeah, and that’s why you’re my little princess.” he tells her as if he had done so a million times before, and Regina feels her heart rise into her burning throat.

_Little princess. Oh, my baby boy._

Lucy giggles and he plants a kiss into her hair before massaging her scalp as she leans into him. Regina knows the gesture well, and she has to look away before her mind replaces the present with the past and the way Henry used to calm when she ghosted her fingernails over his scalp.

But then Henry’s observant eye is catching Regina’s and he gives her a quick, shy smile: the type he reserves for her only. “Mom, do you think you could call Ma to come over and see everyone? I feel bad for not seeing her, but if it’s too much, I can just go over tomorrow--”

Tears brim in her eyes and before she can stop herself, she’s cutting his rambling plans off with a quiet, broken “_Henry._”

He stops and the entire room stills, the wind in the curtains the only ghostlike sound disturbing the silence of the kitchen. His eyes widen and soften completely, his shoulders dropping before he steps across the kitchen and holds her hand in both of his own. “What’s wrong, Mom?”

In her peripheral, Ella takes Lucy gently by the shoulder and begins steering her out of the kitchen with a murmured “Come on, hija,” and a concerned glance at her husband, who with a single returned look expresses to her not to worry.

Regina had gone over this moment before. For nights on end after Emma left and it became clear that she wasn’t returning, she practiced this very moment in her mind, where she would be forced to tell her son that his mother had picked up and left, had turned her back on her home and her family; and every time, her mind had conjured up the most painful images of her son’s face crumbling, usually supplied from times when he was much younger and the looks of pure betrayal on his face had been directed towards _her_. Those images weren’t hard to recover. She thinks of them far too often as is, and now, even with weeks of rehearsal under her belt, she doesn’t have the words. She doesn’t have the means to soften the blow, and all of the sudden, before she can stop herself, she’s blurting out the only words she knows how to say.

“Emma’s gone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, this last scene continues somewhere in the next chapter, so you won't have to wait long.
> 
> Fair warning that all chapters posted so far have been backlogged, because I am currently working on this fic. I started You Found Me late this spring, and the chapters you see written were sporadic in the making. Once I run out of backlogged chapters, waits between updates will be longer and more unpredictable as I am also a full-time college student. I sincerely hope you find patience to bear with me and continue to follow this fic (my favorite I've written so far!) with me. 
> 
> I also fully plan to post my older SwanQueen fics on here (two of which are already completed) so I hope that you will bookmark those little works once I find the strength to transfer and edit all of those chapters!
> 
> I would be overjoyed if you sent me a comment to let me know your thoughts on the chapter! Kudos also go a long way :)


	6. Our Last Hope

**NEW YORK CITY, 2022.**

An insistent, irritating iPhone alarm rings softly through the air, bringing Emma out of a fitful sleep. She reaches towards her nightstand blindly, knocking a bottle of pills and one of her earplugs to the floor before her groping hand makes contact with her phone and switches off the alarm. Her eyes open slowly, her mind a blank, bleary slate as she waits for it to catch up with the rest of her body. 

Instinctively, she looks to her right, but the other side of the bed is messy and empty. She hadn’t really been expecting him to be there. Lately, he’s been leaving for work earlier than usual, and it’s been months since he’s woken her up to say goodbye before he leaves. And even though it sounds terrible and she’s ashamed to think it at all, she can’t say that she misses those moments when she woke up with scratchy lips pressed against her own and a gruff, even obligatory _“goodbye, love,”_ before he escaped the apartment. These days, she finds herself employing a daydream that she lives alone in this apartment, working for her own rent and with the freedom to leave whenever she pleases. Sometimes, in that daydream, she finds herself packing her bags and leaving the city--for good--before she even gets dressed for the day. Alone, without needing permission from a single soul.

Well, not exactly alone. A small smile curls the ends of her lips and her cold feet make contact with the carpet. She crosses the room to her crib, and lifts the child from her blankets and toys. “Good morning, Hope,” she greets her daughter, her voice dry and scratchy from sleep. Hope reaches up and takes fistfuls of Emma’s hair, babbling her own version of _good morning_, and Emma thinks she heard a few _mama’s_ thrown in there too. She lifts her onto her hip, smoothing down the cowlicks in her hair that formed during her sleep.

_“This is a miracle baby, Emma,” her doctor tells her again. Emma barely registers his voice in her head, her entire body fighting to stay awake and not to shut down from the heavy mixture of drugs, exhaustion, and the aftermath of excruciating pain. “Your body really didn’t want this baby, but that little girl persevered.”_

_Fresh tears trail down her cheeks now, a sob escaping her lips as she thinks of countless trips to the hospital, close calls, and the multiple times Emma had completely convinced herself that she’d lost the baby. “She’s a miracle,” she echoes, her voice so broken and hoarse that her words are nearly inaudible._

_“What’s her name?”_

_Emma opens her mouth. Only one name surfaces in her mind, and she wants to--wishes she could--blame it on the drugs. For months now, it’s the only name she can give the invisible little fighter inside of her, and she almost says it. She opens her mouth._ Regina.

_But then Killian’s swooping in and taking the screaming infant from the doctor’s arms and grinning at Emma. “Hope. Because this little one was our last hope, right, Swan?”_

_Her throat closes, and she doesn’t -- but she’s already drifting away before the girl is even in her arms. “Hope,” she whispers to test the unfamiliar syllable on her heavy lips, but then she’s gone._

\---

Emma wipes a lopsided circle with her towel onto the fogged-up mirror and allows herself to study her reflection. Her wet, showered hair hangs in waves around her face and falls down her shoulders and back, darker than usual from the water trapped in the strands. Over time, her hair had grown longer than she’d ever kept it, and though her time in the sun is rather limited, it had become insistently paler and the warm golden hue that used to brighten up her face seemed lost and forgotten. In a moment of self-indulgence, she tries a few different smiles to her own reflection in a sudden attempt to soften the harsh and thin angles of her face. Though she’d only had the baby nearly a year ago, she’d lost the weight much quicker than she’d expected or even meant to; the extra skin at her navel sometimes seems to her the only proof that she’d really given birth.

Her therapist has attempted to express to her that she may be depressed--and the past few sessions that she’s actually attended, the _“maybes”_ that Dr. Thompson supplied had turned into a thunderous _“certainly.”_ A battle has raged on inside of her the last two months and many secret tears have soaked through the fabric of her pillowcase, but she still hasn’t accepted the idea. She can’t be depressed. Her body had just given her a miracle. Four years ago--a lifetime ago to her now--she hadn’t even been able to get pregnant at all; her periods had been heavy and harsh and painfully on _time_, and after nearly five years of trying and an entire move later, her body had finally allowed a little girl to grow inside of her. That baby had become her saving grace; an anchor that held her fragile marriage together and the first thing in her life in years that had looked like a _future_\--and after everything, after she’s finally here, after the worst pregnancy she could have imagined...she’s _depressed_?

Emma claps a hand over her mouth just in time before a squealing sob strangles the air in her throat. Her towel drops around her ankles and she stares at her nakedness through blurry eyes. She’d heard of the fabled _postpartum depression_ of course--she just never believed it could happen to _her_.

She allows herself a brief but head-splitting cry until she splashes her face and mixes her hot tears with the cold water, and tries out those same smiles again. Somehow now, the plastered happiness looks even more fake than it had before. Her breasts ache--heavy and full--and it’s time for Hope’s breakfast. She straightens her shoulders, slides one of her hated, frumpy dresses over her head and leaves the bathroom. She knows how to fill the housewife role.

For the next several hours, she doesn’t think about home even once.

\---

It’s past seven before the lock scrapes in their apartment door and Killian lets himself inside. Dinner had gone cold, and moments before Emma and Hook can speak, Hope begins to fuss. Emma adjusts her against her hip and meets her husband in the tiny entryway, pushing her dry lips against his limp ones for a quick kiss. When she moves away, his face is drawn and his eyes are dark.

She knows not to engage; she knows to heat up the pasta sauce in the microwave and adjust their place settings and take care of Hope before she really begins to cry--maybe she needs to be changed--she knows to make him as comfortable as possible to avoid confrontation and as a silent thank you for providing for their tiny family --

But she doesn’t. This moment is her first interaction with her husband all day, and yesterday she had barely seen him, and just three days ago they’d fought--and suddenly that’s all she wants. She wants, _needs_, to feel something, to be able to use her vocal chords for some use, to have some sort of _conversation_, wants Killian to yell and scream at her so that she knows that she still even exists, that they even have a relationship at all. She’s never wanted to feel something so badly in her life.

So, she dangles a foot off the edge of the cliff. “You’re home late.”

His eyes flick dangerously toward hers. “I was working, Emma. Working to support you and this family. I’m sure you can excuse me.”

Emma wants to laugh. She wants to throw her head back and laugh maniacally, just to let something in her loose and to show him her utter frustration. “I know that we’re struggling to pay rent, Killian. I’m not stupid, I open the bills, I calculate their costs even though I know you don’t like me doing it.”

She’s not finished, but Killian throws his hand in the air, and she finally gets a reaction out of him, however small. “Why are you trying to fight with me?”

She doesn’t answer his question. Instead, she revisits the same topic they’ve been circling for nearly a year now, and throws herself off the cliff entirely. “Which is _why, Killian,_ I think I should get a job. I’m trying to _help_; this is one of the smallest apartments they have to offer, and we’re still struggling, especially with a new baby--why won’t you just let me _work_ to provide for my own family?”

“We’ve _talked_ about this, Swan!” He shouts, stepping closer. Hope begins to fuss again, and Emma steps back to regain their distance. 

“_I know we--_”

“I’ve told you that _I_ want to be the one to support _my_ wife and _my_ child. I’ve told you countless times. And I can’t believe you’re bringing _Hope_ into this--the fact that we have a baby is the reason you need to stay home! I can’t believe you’re practically begging me to leave her. What do you want to do, hm? Leave her home with a _nanny_ from morning till - till _night_? How do you expect us to raise her at all?” As he continues his speech, his accusations becoming more and more harsh, his voice rises and he continues to walk towards her. 

By the end, he’s close enough for Emma to watch the strings of spit between his teeth to thicken and thin with the movement of his jaw, and she’s had enough time to regret her decision to fight a thousand times over.

A seed of panic rises from the pit of her stomach, her throat mimicking an allergic reaction by closing up and blocking off her air flow. Her head pounds, her eyes so full of tears that she doesn’t need to blink for them to fall to the floor. Holding Hope closer to her still, she backs away slowly, her eyes hard and her mouth set into a thin line, feeling as though she’s floating from her body and watching herself speak from a distance. 

“How..._dare you_. How dare you put those words about my _daughter_ into my mouth.”

“_WHAT would you have me do, Swan?!_” He yells after her as she retreats into their room while Hope cries.

All at once, she sees herself in Storybrooke--white pulsing magic pouring from her, fighting off everything and anything that threatened her family--she sees her Sheriff badge glisten on her belt as she tackles a criminal and restores the peace; she sees, for a moment, the woman she was, with golden hair and rosy cheeks and life sparkling in her eyes. And for a moment, she lets that fearless woman step in front of her and answer his question. She narrows her eyes and wraps a shielding hand around Hope’s tiny head. The woman opens her mouth and gives him an answer. “I would _have_ that you fix your own damn dinner and sleep on the couch tonight.” 

She closes the door behind her, bracing it with her back, and slides down onto the floor, hugging Hope to her as she weeps. Her phone, sunk deep into her cardigan pocket, connects with the floor, and she slides it out, opening to her contacts and looking at the screen long after it turns dark again. Her thumb stills, hovered over _Regina_’s name for several minutes. She doesn’t call her.

And finally, the woman she was, the one who had protected her, leaves and takes her life and health and happiness with her.

\---

_“Emma’s gone.”_

Regina looks at her son, awaiting his reaction. Outside, a bird repeats its same woeful tune over and over again, disrupting the silence and piercing unease further into Regina with every chirp. 

Henry closes his eyes and rocks back with a single step, shaking his head sadly through a quiet sigh. “Oh, _Emma_.” When he opens his eyes, they’re wet, and he pulls Regina to his chest with a strength new to her, and holds her there with a hand smoothing down her hair. “I’m _so_ sorry, Mom.”

His voice is soft and sad and more tired and empathetic than she’s ever heard it, and all she can do is stand in shock, pushed up against his chest in his embrace and wonder what happened to the son she used to know. But the pressure of his grip is exactly what she needs, and before she knows what’s happening, she’s crying, letting out all of the emotions towards Emma she’s been suppressing for days and months and years.

He rubs her back and waits until her sobs cease before pressing gently. “How long?”

She stands a little straighter, wiping her eyes as regally as she can and swallows the lump in her throat before answering. “She moved two months after you left. She - I - I helped her pack up--”

He shakes his head, wiping away a tear lingering on her cheek with his thumb. “You did the right thing, Mom. She...needed you for that. _God_, Hook really broke her down, didn’t he? I knew she was struggling, I knew she was hurting in that marriage before I even left, but I had no idea the extent of it.” He closes his eyes briefly, and their conversation in his room the day he left flashes through his mind.

_“Ma...you’ll keep her company, won’t you? You’ll watch over her?”_

_“Of course I will.”_

_“Thank you. I just - I worry about her, Ma.”_

_“I know you do, Kid, and that’s good, and you’re an amazing son for worrying, but she’s a really strong badass, remember?”_

_“I know, I know. She’s just different with me. It’s always been different with me.”_

_“She loves you more than anything, you know that, don’t you?”_

_“Yeah. Thanks, Ma.”_

His heart breaks looking back on that innocent conversation with a thousand layers wrapped up inside of it. For his part, he’d been worried about Regina living in this huge house all alone and missing him far too much--but he’d also been shrewdly angling toward the feelings he knew his mothers hid from each other and from themselves. He’d seen her dodging phone calls, seen the way her hair fell limp and face pasty from breaking down her natural-born leader in order to follow Hook’s will in every way--even if it meant giving up everything she had. Of course, back then, he hadn’t dreamed that it would go this far, but as a man he sees things far too clearly.

And god, how that conversation must have torn up his other mother from the inside out; the way she was forced to make a promise she knew she would need to break--a promise she wanted to keep more than anything.

Henry sucks his teeth and covers Regina’s shoulder with his hand. “You need to call her, Mom. This isn’t even for me anymore.”

She drops her head, flicking her eyes between him and the floor. “I miss her, Henry, but she’s lost. I think she’s been gone much longer than four years,” she says significantly, licking her dry lips and looking as though she’s resuming her mental battle of whether she should continue showing her vulnerability. He feels for her--he really does--he hasn’t even given himself a chance to think about how all this change must be affecting her; and Jesus, that woman is strong.

But she needs the strength of his belief right now, and though there’s been more moments than not in the past thirteen years that he truly thought that the gift of belief had left him for good--leaving nothing more than a broken man in its wake who made enough mistakes to paralyze himself and tear his family apart. But he’ll be damned if his mother ever sees that version of him--the true man he thinks he’s become--so he softens his eyes and catches her gaze and delivers hope on a silver platter. 

“You can’t give up on her, Mom. I’ve been gone for so long that I can’t begin to understand what you’ve been through with her, but she needs you. If anyone can get through to her, it’s _you_. You _have to_ try.” For a few moments, he thinks he believes himself. And if he can believe in anyone, it’s his hard-ass, force-to-be-reckoned-with mother; and if he didn’t feel so lost, he thinks he would try to save Emma himself.

But his daughter’s in the other room, and his present life is waiting for him, so begins to step back and keep Emma where he left her--in the past. Thirteen years is a long time, and he’s afraid that if he hears her flat voice on the other line, he won’t recognize her at all.

\---

Regina looks up, a flash of hope running through her, and finds a smile twitching her lips. She thanks the gods that after everything, that no matter how long she’s separated from her son, he can always believe enough for the two of them. For the first time since she’d heard a knock on her door, it feels as though no time has passed.

He slips out of the room to give her privacy, and her fingers pick up her phone without her telling them to. After a moment’s hesitation, she presses Emma’s number. The dial tone hums into her ear--and the hope within her grows with every ring. She’s missed her. _God_, she’s missed Emma so much.

\---

When Emma wakes up again, it’s noon. She sits up slowly and stiffly, her entire body and mind frozen still. Her cheeks feel inexplicably tight, as if the dried tears from last night had somehow clung to her face for so long. She’d slept for fourteen hours, and as much as she wants the number to disgust her, it doesn’t. She doesn’t feel anything. 

_Excessive sleeping,_ Dr. Thompson supplies unhelpfully into her ear, _another sure sign of depression._ She groans and squeezes her eyes shut, tears already swimming in them as a sarcastic thought barges into her mind that sounds something like _at least she’s feeling something at all._ But her throat is completely dry and her heart is thudding in her chest, and before she knows what she’s doing, she’s crouching on the floor to find the bottle of pills she had knocked off her nightstand the morning before. The orange container is partially hidden under the bedskirt, and she picks it up, the pills tapping against the plastic, full to the top. She’d taken the medication home, mostly to shut Dr. Thompson up, if not just for the sake of it, but she hadn’t taken a single pill. 

All at once, she makes a split decision in her mind and pops off the top, spilling tablets into her hand. She takes two and swallows them dry.

Her heart doesn’t stop pounding for minutes after, and she lays against her warm, rumpled pillows, and does her best not to think at all. 

Hope isn’t in the room; she knows that much without even needing to check. It’s ten minutes past noon on a Saturday. She knows that Killian had slipped in sometime during the morning to take her and feed and change her. She’s grateful for it, and now, after the long night and in her exhaustion, she doesn’t have it in her to be angry anymore. She supposes she should thank him for letting her sleep. She supposes she should do whatever she can now to repair what last night had broken. She’s used to fixing things. She might even slick her eyelashes in mascara and dig out the lingerie collecting dust at the back of her drawer. 

She has a never-ending supply of band-aids for her relationship, it seems. As she moves to collect things for a shower, she unwraps another bandage and prepares to break more of herself away to give to him.

She almost makes it to the door of her room before her phone rings. Curiosity piqued, she shifts her clothes for the day under her arm and picks up her phone plugged in by her nightstand -- and then her blood chills in her veins.

It’s Regina.

She can’t remember the last time she saw her name on her phone--and she can’t remember the last time that she had called Regina. Her mind’s eye reminds her of the night before, when her thumb had trembled above her name and everything in her had simultaneously screamed for and against calling her best friend.

She wants to pick up. She _does_. She thinks she wants to more than she’s wanted something in far too long, but she’s terrified. She’s too scared of what could have possibly caused her to reach out, and she’s afraid of the weight that rests on this phone call as their first contact in years. It’s been so long for them now that every moment that passes between them without contact is another inch that separates them.

Even without considering their friendship, Emma’s too scared of _herself_ to answer the phone. She _knows_ without even having to think about it that she’s a different woman than she was when she first came to Storybrooke, or even when she had discovered the full potential of her magic--but what’s harder to accept is the fact that she knows that she’s a different person than she was when she had left Storybrooke to move here. She’s afraid to hear Regina’s voice, to be reminded of the life she left back there; and she’s afraid of what _she_ might say to Regina.

And she’s afraid that if she exposes the person she’s become, Regina will never forgive her.

So there she stands, watching her phone buzz and lingering as the phone call reaches its last ring, and it’s over. She’s made her choice.

But she leaves her room before she has the chance to realize that the other woman hadn’t quite given up on her just yet. Three minutes later, Emma’s phone lights up with a voicemail.

\---

_*beep*_

_“...Hello, Miss Swan. I suppose you’re too busy to come to the phone right now--which, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be talking to myself.”_

A pause.

_“You’d better not still be sleeping,”_ she interrupts herself with a small chuckle, _“but if you are, please remember to drink a glass of water when you return to the land of the living._ Not _one of those tiny plastic cups you refuse to throw away, a real glass, please._

_“I suppose you’re wondering why I called, but the truth is that I’m not exactly sure myself. There’s too much to tell, and I wouldn’t know where to begin. But to be fair, we haven’t spoken in over two years--yes, I’ve kept track. And I miss you._

_“I guess that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? That I miss you. I miss you more than I would care to admit. But I told you that day at the water that I would support whatever made you happy. So I’ll be the first to admit my weakness and say I’m having a hard time keeping my word--but I don’t believe you anymore. I don’t believe that you’re happy, and I don’t think I ever did. _

_“I don’t know where this is going. I don’t even know if this still your number. If it is, Emma, if you’re listening...please come home.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Please drop me a comment if you enjoyed :)


	7. The In-Between

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ohhh god, sorry this is such a late update! Please enjoy, and happy new year!

**THE ENCHANTED FOREST, TEN YEARS AGO.**

“You’re _Cinderella?_” 

The woman’s eyes narrow and flash her well-cloaked nervousness. “You know me?” she queries slowly and carefully, but alarm seeps from every pore in her face. She’d already dismounted, but she begins stepping backward, away from the rather impressive fire Henry had succeeded in poking and prodding.

He places a careful hand in front of him, palm up, and does his best to give a reassuring, charming smile--one that he knows likely comes off as more of a grimace. “No, no - it’s a ‘my realm’ thing. You’re kinda popular there.”

Her eyes widen in curiosity, and she takes a careful step towards Henry. “What do you mean?”

“It’s nothing, it’s just a movie,” he shakes his head, biting his cheek in an attempt to remain serious. 

She draws closer, eyebrows knitted together. “_Movie?_”

“Yeah, like a --” he begins, then frowns when he realizes he has no idea how to go about explaining the topic to a woman who grew up in a completely different world, one whose life is more than likely much different than the stories he’s used to; and especially to a woman who is so beautiful he can hardly form a coherent sentence. “-- you know what? Never mind. Sorry.” 

She cocks her head to the side, then shrugs with a small laugh. “You’re very strange, Henry. Henry …?”

Henry looks towards her with wide eyes before realizing her question. “Oh. Uh -- Mills.”

She smiles, sitting on the opposite side of the fire and gazes at him through the flickering flames. “Henry Mills.”

\---

“Tell me about your realm, Henry Mills.”

Henry glances at her from his reclined position on the other side of the charred wood where the fire had been burning an hour or two ago. The sun was low in the sky before he had worked up the nerve to suggest they camp here for the night, with plenty of fresh grass for Kaladian to graze and the shelter of tall evergreen trees. To his surprise, she had only taken her pack from Kaladian’s saddle and began clearing a space for her body as a way of expressing her agreement. 

Dusk now paints the sky and brings a coolness that refreshes them from the hotness and humidity of that afternoon. He shrugs and brings his hands behind his head to get more comfortable. “Oh, god. I dunno--there’s more buildings and roads, way less green spaces and nature. There’s more ‘headless horses’ like my bike, lots of restaurants and bars,” he sighs, rattling off whatever comes to mind. Then he catches her eye and smirks. “_And_ movies.”

They share a laugh and Ella smiles in wonder and curiosity. “That sounds very strange. Strange, but interesting.”

Henry tosses a stone up into the air, catches it, then tosses it again. “It’s different, but people are the same pieces of shit they are over here.” 

She snickers softly and flops onto her back to mimic his position. “I see. So, not so different, hm?”

He turns his head towards hers and smiles. “Guess not.”

The silence is broken by the sound of hooves thundering down the path, becoming closer and closer as the seconds tick past. Henry can feel the sensation on the hard ground and in his core as he scrambles to a stand. Ella has already sprung up and begun fumbling with the knot in her horse’s reins against the tree trunk. When Henry’s eyes meet hers, he finds pure, unbridled panic in every inch of her expression.

“_Mierda!_ They’ll find me,” she breathes out in a terrified whisper, already one foot in the stirrup to mount. Then, casting another glance at Henry, she shakes her head, her curls swaying with the movement. “I’ve stayed too long.”

“Stayed too -- what do you mean, _they’ll find you?_” He demands, watching helplessly as she mounts and, after a moment’s hesitation, reattaches her pack to the back of her saddle.

“I have to go. I’m sorry, Henry,” she turns once more towards him, shortening her reins and preparing to run. He sees real regret and remorse in her eyes, as the thundering hoofbeats grow ever louder. Her heels squeeze and Kaladian springs to life.

“How will I find you again?!” Henry shouts after her, his heart in his ears as she gallops away.

Ella looks over her shoulder as the wind whips through her and gives him a weighted, communicative look he can’t begin to understand, and then she’s gone.

He barely has time to process what had happened before the sound of muted footsteps belonging to more than one man reaches his ears. His body springs into action before his mind catches up to it, scuffing his boots over the matted grass where she had been laying and stomping on the last dying embers hidden deep in the black logs. Instinctively, he reaches to the small of his back where he keeps his dagger, but it’s not there and his fingers close on empty air. His heart drops, mind flashing to the moment when Ella had “tripped” behind him while they searched for more firewood and her hand had brushed against his back, and how he’d laughed, and he’d been so taken with her --

_No._

The next moment, four uniformed palace guards enter his field of vision. The one in front signals with his hand and they spread out, searching the clearing. Then, spotting him, they make their way towards him. His heart still racing, he crosses his arms in front of his chest and does his best to appear at ease.

“Can I help you, officers?” he jokes, trying to judge their expressions behind the shade cast from their helmets.

“You seen a woman around here today?”

Henry swallows, a chill running through his bloodstream. Surely he didn’t mean..? He gives the guards a small, relaxed smile. “Woman? You might have to be a bit more specific, friend.”

His smooth talking doesn’t have the calming effect he’d hoped for either on himself or on the men in front of him. Stoney faced, the one who Henry assumes to be the commander steps closer to him and places a careful hand on the hilt of his sword. “We’re talking about the runaway princess here. She’s been on the run for years.”

Henry’s smile falters. “Runaway princess?”

“You’re not from around here, are you? Cinderella. We’ve been trying to put her away since she ran off.” Henry feels himself blanch. “You okay there, mister?”

“Yeah, I - I’m not from here. I’ve never heard of her.”

“Hey!” One of the guards calls near the place Kaladian had been grazing. “Horse has been here.” 

“You hear that?” The commander directs towards Henry, raising an eyebrow. “Fresh hoof prints. You sure you ain’t see anyone?”

The guard who had noticed the evidence of Ella’s horse steps towards his commander, holding a very familiar object. “Found this, too.”

Henry’s throat had gone dry during the last set of questions, but he finds his tongue when he notices what’s in the guard’s hand. “Hey, that’s my dagger,” he exhales in relief, sidestepping the commander’s question and inspecting the knife. _H.M._ had been engraved in gold lettering on the handle, a going-away present from Mr. Gold that demonstrated the extent of his grandfather’s thoughtfulness. “Those are my initials,” he explains to them as they hand it back to him. “I thought I lost it.”

The guards regard him with a new sort of respect, as if they can’t imagine anyone who isn’t important owning a personalized object. Henry bites the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. At some point, she must have decided against stealing from him and left it for him to find--maybe they really had made a connection, and this was her way of communicating that to him. It’s not exactly a glass slipper, but he’ll take it.

“Alright, Sir, just be sure to report it if you see her.” The guards nod in a near-unison, and the commander begins to lead the group away.

Henry almost lets them go, but a biting curiosity slides past his lips. “You - you said you’ve been trying to ‘put her away’ for years. What did she do?” He asks, watching them freeze in their tracks as a shiver runs down his spine. He finds himself fearing the answer he might receive. 

The commander turns back to him and pulls a folded-up piece of paper from his belt. “I’m surprised you’ve gone this far without seeing one of these,” he says, handing Henry the paper. “My advice? If you see her, run in the other direction. Bitch is dangerous.”

The guards have disappeared from view and the last of the color in the sky has faded before he finds the nerve to unfold the piece of paper. When he does, he really wishes he hadn’t.

The poster shakes in his hands as he stares at the drawing between the words; the drawing of the very woman he had begun to fall in love with holds his eye contact until he can no longer stand it and he crumples the poster and casts it to the forest floor.

**WANTED: Princess Cinderella of Tremaine Manor for MURDER and TREASON.**

\---

Anxiety courses through Henry as he paces the open clearing underneath the hazy starlight. He’d battled for hours over what he should do with this newfound information: if he should run like hell even though his heart is pulling unrelentlessly at him to stay. 

He doesn’t even know if she’ll be coming back here. And if she does, what force is compelling him to remain where she’ll find him--if she’s really so dangerous? He grips his dagger in his fist, fingering the blade with his other hand. Yes, she’d stolen from him, but she’d also put it back where he would find it--and although he hardly knows the woman, even less so now than he imagined he did a few hours ago, he can tell she’s not careless enough in nature to accidentally drop his knife in the grass seconds before securing her pack to her horse’s saddle and racing away. His quickly-turning mind had pieced this conclusion together multiple times over, but the in-between is killing him, of whether she really will come back to find him when she feels it’s safe enough to do so or if he’d been wrong about this, too. He doesn’t know how he would handle that. He feels that lately he’s made too many mistakes, and once something finally feels _right_ to him--his heart drops in his chest when he considers the possibility that everything had been a lie.

The crumpled poster stares up at him from the earthy ground, seeming as if to mock him. _Murder and treason._ She wasn’t just on the run, she’d _killed_. His blood chills and he glances behind him, in spite of himself. He imagines them gathering more firewood in the forest after she’d pickpocketed his knife and himself holding kindle in his arms and turning to speak to her--

\--and then Ella siding up next to him and using his own weapon to slit his throat, nice and easy and slow, listening to the gurgling blood and the choking and his inability to draw more air as spots cloud his vision and red paints the forest.

The air seems to ring afterwards, even though he hadn’t spoken a single word out loud. He grips his knife tighter and tries to relax. He’s not naive enough to believe that everything is exactly how it seems, and if his long, convoluted family history is anything to go by, it rarely ever is. He thinks of the old Book, tattered and hidden away in his room, and the pages filled with Snow White’s own wanted posters with the very same accusations. And while his grandmother has her own share of sins and shortcomings, she’d never taken a single life during the years she spent on the run from Regina.

“Henry.”

Despite his attempts to rationalize the fear gnawing inside of him, the voice startles him greatly, even more so when he realizes to whom it belongs. Snapping to attention, his eyes sweep the space around him until he finds her figure in the shadow of a tree. This time, she hadn’t come in a saddle.

He begins walking toward her, his mind flashing a _warning_ sign in front of his eyes all the while. Wherever his mother is, she’s probably just suffered a mysterious heart attack. Still, he walks, and she meets him somewhere in the middle. She smiles up at him, but he doesn’t return the gesture.

“You stole my dagger.”

She glances down at his fist, watching the moonlight reflect off the metal blade. “I gave it back,” she counters, and this time, Henry does smile.

“You’re not wrong,” he chuckles, returning his dagger to its place and crossing his arms. “I suppose I should be grateful.”

They share a laugh, but Henry finds himself looking away from her piercing gaze, too many questions on his lips. Without warning, she walks a few feet to the left of him and picks up the paper partially hidden in the tall grass.

Henry’s pulse quickens and he curses inwardly. Why did he leave it in plain sight? He watches anxiously as she calmly walks back to his side, smoothing out the crinkles before regarding her own wanted poster.

“So, now you know,” she says quietly, still fingering the paper in her slender hands.

“Only what that poster tells me,” he responds, his voice coming out stronger than he’d expected it to, and when their eyes lock, he attempts a smirk. “You come back here to kill me?” He’s only half kidding.

She swallows hard, folding the poster into increasingly smaller squares, so as not to meet his gaze. When she speaks, there’s a small tremor in her voice. “I’ve never killed a single soul,” she begins, but when she finally looks at him, her eyes are wet. “But I deserve that title.”

Henry draws his brows together and steps closer. “What are you talking about?”

Ella opens her mouth as if to answer, but after several moments of hesitation, she shakes her head so that her curls cloak her face in shadow. “I barely know you.”

“You’re right, you don’t know me. I’m just some random guy you met because he wasn’t looking where he was going and he made you crash your horse, one who has no way of finding you again, and one who’s from a completely different realm. I’m the perfect therapist.”

Confusion flickers across her features for a moment, but she returns his grin. “You are the strangest man I’ve ever met, Henry Mills.”

He smirks, then finds his hand moving of its own accord to gently brush a curl from her eye. “So I’ve heard.”

\---

Together, they build a newer, larger fire just where the other had been, silence stretching between them as the wood pops that somehow isn’t uncomfortable in the slightest. All the while, a small voice in the back of his mind nags and asks what he’s doing here, but a louder voice pushes it away and answers that he thinks he knows the answer to that, anyway. Henry sits cross-legged in front of the fire, watching Ella move ever closer to its warmth and somehow, with every movement, it’s one ever closer to Henry. It’s so slight that it’s something that wouldn’t be noticeable to someone who wasn’t looking for it--which Henry definitely isn’t--he’s observant, always has been.

Which is a reason he can attribute to the fact that he isn’t speaking. As he spends more time with her, he can gradually read her more closely, and he knows far better than to poke and prod. Either she’ll talk, or she won’t, and he’s working on being okay with either outcome. 

But his Author powers have yet to fail him, and he doesn’t read a single line of danger written within her; as he looks at her and memorizes her features, he realizes that even if he never knows the full truth of her past, he wants to stay for her future.

“I grew up in the palace those guards are hunting me to protect. My father was a nobleman, but when he married my mother, a princess from this kingdom, he became royalty. I was born here, and my mother died before I reached ten years of age.”

Henry hadn’t moved his eyes from the fire since she began her story, but when she pauses, he lifts his gaze to hers. She doesn’t look up. Her face is drawn and unreadable, and the flames flicker and disrupt the shadows on her frame. He doesn’t realize he isn’t breathing until he’s nearly out of air.

“He remarried when I was fourteen years old. Her name was Lady Tremaine, and her daughters--”

“Drizella and Anastasia?” Henry guesses before he can stop himself.

She finally turns her eyes to him, and he thinks for a moment that he sees a shimmer of airy light behind her dark eyes. “Let me guess. Another ‘your realm’ thing?”

Henry smirks and tries to ignore the way his heart is slamming in a way he hadn’t experienced since he was a star-crossed teenager with hormones that could make him jump out of his skin if he even thought about them the wrong way. “I knew you’d catch on.” She smiles, and Henry has to bite the inside of his cheek to forcibly find his way back to the topic at hand. “I’m sorry, I interrupted you.”

She waves a hand in casual forgiveness, and Henry could swear that when she stretched out more comfortably, she shifted closer to his left side. “They despised me. All three of them, but above all, my stepmother. I think, looking back, she couldn’t stand the way my father loved me more than he loved her. He never made it obvious, at least he never tried to--he was the sweetest man I’ve ever known. But she knew. 

“She made my life a living hell. She humiliated me in ways you couldn’t begin to imagine. She was a sick sort of artist; there was a creative, new way to her madness, so that I could never expect or plan for the way she would destroy me next. But I lived through it all, because my father loved her, and I never told him a single sin she had committed against me. He’d never fully healed from my mamá’s death, and I feared he was going, too.

“That’s why the kingdom wasn’t surprised or suspicious when he suddenly died late in the winter of my eighteenth year. It was a tragedy of the highest order, but there was no doubt of the fact that it was of natural causes and an underlying cause of heartbreak. But I knew better.”

She pauses again for a moment, and for the first time since she began, Henry notices the thin tracks of tears staining her cheeks. A sinking, sick feeling grows inside of him when he realizes he has an idea of where her story is headed.

“Ella,” he whispers, but she doesn’t look at him. Instead, she covers her face with her hands for a long moment before sniffing and clearing her throat to continue in a strangely matter-of-fact manner.

“She killed him. _Lady Tremaine_, queen of the castle, his wife, murdered my father. I watched her strange behavior for days. I saw her long, pacing walks around the grounds and in her study. In the last years of their marriage, my stepmother and my father took to separate rooms while they slept. But that last night, she went into his chamber. I heard her sweet murmurs that it was to make amends. But my father never walked out of that room again.”

A deep breath later, she’s continuing, more fearless than Henry could imagine. “Something broke in me that winter. I was never the same. Her behavior towards worsened tenfold after my father no longer there to witness it, but I was numb in my grief and my rage. I lived, breathed, and fed on my anger. I was so far gone I no longer recognized myself in the mirror. All I cared about was my revenge in my father’s name. That’s when I reached the point of no return. I escaped from the castle one night and paid a villager in a tavern a great sum to tell me the location of the fabled voodoo doctor, known by the locals as _The Shadowman_. I had heard tales of him ever since I was a little girl. I knew him to be an evil sorcerer, a dabbler in dark magic, but a very powerful one, and one who would make dark deals to exact revenge on enemies. Lady Tremaine was my enemy, and I was desperate. Desperate enough to make a deal with the devil.

“It took me several days, but I found him at the edge of this forest. My greatest shame and regret is that I went through with it--as much as I could then. I told him everything. He promised to give me my revenge, but in return, I owed him an unknown favor. I belonged to him, under his mercy. I...I agreed. Looking back, I don’t know what I thought would happen, or what I thought I wanted. I wanted her hurt, yes. I certainly wanted her cast out from the kingdom, and yes, maybe for a moment then, I even wanted her dead. But I never specified what type of revenge I wanted extracted towards her, which was my greatest mistake. I stayed in his hut that night, but I didn’t get a single minute of rest. The entire night, I tossed and turned and my conscience tortured me with terrible visions, and when I did manage to sleep, they were nightmares. It only took that one night for me to change my mind. I got up at the first light to tell the witch doctor that I wanted to call it off, and that I certainly didn’t want her _dead_\--but he--but he was gone. It was too late.”

Finally, a sob escapes her lips, and she curls her knees to her chest as if she’s attempting to embrace herself to offer her own body a scrap of comfort. “The next news I heard, my stepmother was brutally murdered, and for good measure, he had left strands of my hair and my knife at the scene to frame me--but I was responsible for her death either way. 

“For the past three years, I’ve been on the run from the palace and from..._him_. I’ve been too scared to leave the kingdom entirely because he would know the moment I left, and I’m sure that he made a doll of me the second I set foot in that horrible place. I was a coward then, and I’m a coward now.” For the first time since she had continued her story, she looks him dead in the eye. “I don’t want to die.”

\---

**STORYBROOKE, MAINE, 2022.**

“When did you know that you loved her?”

The question doesn’t startle Henry in the slightest. Though the air had been silent for several minutes before, he’d been expecting it ever since his mother had met his wife that morning in the foyer. 

They’re laying on her bed, and the king-sized mattress that had always seemed as large as an entire country to him when he was a little boy still seems to swallow them whole as they lay so close to each other that their breathing is synced. He has no idea how late it is, but he guesses it’s around two in the morning--and he’s savoring every single moment with his mother. 

Thirteen years is a long, long, long time. So long, that when he thinks back to the vast years he spent away from this world and his other family, away from her, it scares him. It scares him even more that in the time he’d been away, it seems that hardly anything had changed in the town that had always seemed incapable of it, when everything about himself had changed. It’s a scary, alienating feeling that he no longer belongs, no longer fits the way he is now in the town he grew up in, the one place he felt like he’d always belong. In all of the grand total of _four years_ he’d been away--for them--they’d been expecting the same boy to return, and he can’t give that to them. 

But after more than a few frightening moments when he and his mother had failed to connect the way they had before, he drinks in their companionship now. For the first time, it feels as though it may be possible to bridge the terrible gap time had wedged between them.

So, he sighs and clears his throat to find his voice again. He doesn’t have to think for a second to find his answer. “It was that night,” he mutters, more to himself than to Regina in that moment. “It was that same night that she laid herself in front of me like an open book, and I realized that a twisted perfection can be found in the worst mistake someone has ever made. She became the most beautiful, dimensional person I had ever met, and in that moment, I wanted to do everything I could to take her away from her pain and make it so that she wouldn’t ever have to be scared again.”

He turns towards his mother, who, for someone who knows nothing of what Ella had told him that night ten years ago, looks as if she understands far too much. But, he muses, if anyone would understand what he means by that, she would. “I took her away from that place. I took her away and we started a family.”

“Oh, Henry,” she whispers, the sound a guttural rumbling inside of her that gives him the same calming sensation it had since he knew the sound of her voice. 

There’s tears in her eyes, but he has the overwhelming urge to take the pride away from her--his own greatest mistake hanging over his head in a way that threatens to drown him. “We started our family, and then I made my biggest mistake. And I still don’t know what it’ll yield. It’s tortured me for years--I don’t know what I’ll do when it comes back to find me. To find my -- my family,” he whispers, the words poisonous on his tongue. 

His mother only grips his hands harder in her soft, small, strong grasp and presses a long kiss to his temple. “Tell me everything, my little prince.”

Henry takes a breath.


	8. The Shadowman

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my godddd, I'm so sorry for how late this update is! I had severe writer's block and also I was mostly focusing on school, but now this chapter that I have written over the course of SEVERAL months is finally ready for publishing! Thank you so much for those who waited.
> 
> Stay safe and healthy everyone! Stay inside!
> 
> Pls leave a comment if you enjoyed :)

**THE ENCHANTED FOREST, THREE YEARS AGO.**

Other senses proceed sight, generally, when Henry reaches consciousness in the mornings. First, his ears wake up and fill his head with birdsong and creaks of the other side of the bed belonging to his wife, and, more recently, the pattering of little feet across the small home they’d created. Lucy has been beating her parents to the sunrises, sliding out of her bed and sitting on haystacks to watch the clouds burst with sunlight. Henry has found that once she gets bored of that, she’ll bring her footprints inside and sometimes--_usually_\--makes enough intentional noise to wake her parents.

Next is his nose; the scent of morning air and Ella’s hair and sometimes, breakfast wafting from the kitchen when Ella manages to wake before he does. But his favorite has always been touch. More often than not, he finds himself reaching across the mattress for his wife before he even opens his eyes, and his hand will find the thickness of her hair or the warmth of her chest, and he’ll relax into her, knowing she’ll be there every time, but finding all of his strength and happiness in the reassurance. On really special days, he’ll wake up to a kiss or two before his eyes blink open.

Today, he rolls over and gropes for her touch, but the bed is emptier than usual. He opens his eyes and stretches with the newfound space, but still finds himself longing for her presence even though he’d only just seen her the night before. They’ve been married for six years now, but he sometimes thinks he loves her a little more every day, and only wants more and more of her--enough that her touch not being the first moment of his day is likely to throw off the rest of it. He never knew how annoying and sappy he would be as a husband. He thinks of himself ten years ago, knowing the eighteen-year-old would be gagging at his future self. He chuckles to himself and sits up straighter, pulling on his riding pants but not bothering to change out of his nightshirt. He glances out the window at the sun and judges it’s not yet seven o’clock. What’s Ella doing up this early?

He doesn’t get a chance to stand fully before a small figure races into the room and barrels into his chest. His heart pounds warmly and he wraps his arms around her, fingers tangling in her dark hair and scratching lightly at her scalp.

“G’morning, Daddy!” the five-year-old grins up at him, and he can’t help but smile back so widely his cheeks ache. He will never tire of this. It hurts to think of his mother, but he can’t stop himself, and all at once he thinks that he finally understands how she felt about him. It’s an ongoing realization he keeps coming back to as he raises Lucy--something that’s utterly impossible to grasp until he can hold his daughter in his arms and roughhouse her onto the bed, growling as he flips over on top of her and tickles her in all of her favorite spots.

“What are you doing up so early, princess?” he asks once she’s settled down and found her breath after his merciless pinching. She lays sprawled on the bed, tangling her limbs in the sheets and rubbing her bottom into the mattress. She always says that their bed is the comfiest, and last year, Henry was positive she faked quite a few nightmares just to be allowed to sleep sandwiched between her parents.

She gives him a silly smile with two rows of perfect baby teeth, and Henry’s heart pinches for a moment when he thinks of her losing them within the next year. “Watching the sunrise, Daddy,” she replies like she always does, and Henry rubs his thumb over her small hand fondly, enjoying the habitual conversation they have most mornings. “You should watch it too!”

Well, this part is new. He laughs and shakes his head. “I dunno, Pumpkin, Daddy needs all the sleep he can get.” He twists and his back pops satisfyingly. 

But then she’s looking at him with those big brown eyes and he's shaking his head again, caving faster than the pressure it takes to pick apart cotton. “But if you _really_ want me to watch it with you tomorrow, I will.”

She leaps up excitedly, and he picks her up and sets her down on the floor as he stands. “Okay, okay, let’s find some breakfast. Where’s Mom?”

“Riding, I think,” she supplies, brushing dark hair strands away from her eyes with the palm of her little hand. 

Sure enough, Henry glances out the window towards the stable and finds Kaladian missing from the rest of the grazing creatures. He notices himself frowning, crossing his arms in front of his chest. Ella doesn't go for early morning rides often, and when she does, it's more than likely because of something weighing heavily on her mind. His shoulders relax when he makes out a familiar figure trotting into view, and he gives his daughter a smile. 

“Think you can set the table for me, Luce? I'm gonna grab Mommy.”

“‘kay, Daddy.”

He puts his hand out to ruffle the hair on the top of her head, feeling a sense of almost paralyzing familiarity wash over him--

\--didn't his blonde mother use to dig her fingers through his hair, mussing up his bangs with a smirk and a glimmer in her eye to match? Didn't she use to smile and laugh far more often in those days, days that, in his mind, seem caught between a thousand years ago and seeming as though they were only yesterday? 

He can see her thin lips spreading apart and her teeth that were slightly crooked on the bottom row and raised eyebrows, and he can replace the images instantly with her furrowed brow and a seemingly permanent frown pushing her lips together, and he can remember wondering. An insistent wondering, sometimes bordering on obsession, as to _why_ his fearless mother would stay in a marriage that turned its back on all of her beliefs, and one that made her eyes stop dancing and her hand stop reaching to ruffle his hair.

And then a simultaneous realization that the two issues may have been less related than his racing mind had put together; that maybe she’d only stopped because he’d grown up--

\--and then taking a moment to realize, himself, that one day the tiny child in front of him would grow up and take her blinding youthfulness with her; and he too would one day look at her and wonder when he stopped messing up her hair. 

The swirling mixture of thoughts enter and exit his mind in a matter of a second or two, and he cradles her cheek with the sides of his fingers for a moment before stepping outside.

By the time he reaches the stable, Ella is just walking up to it, releasing her reins and allowing Kaladian to drop his neck and slow his pace to a near-standstill. Henry shades his eyes against the morning sun beginning to rise above the trees as he looks up at her. 

“Fancy meeting you here, my fair lady,” he says, watching as she rolls her eyes fondly. 

“Good morning to you, too.” She slips her right foot out of the stirrup and swings her leg around, preparing to dismount. Henry moves closer, spreading his lips and lengthening his vowel sounds. 

“Allow me, Madam,” he croons, catching her neatly in his arms before her feet have the chance to connect with the ground. 

“You're ridiculous,” she says, giggling as he shifts her weight into a bridal-style carry. Her teasing contradicts the way her arms reach up and lock around his neck and her chest sides up closer to his, relishing in the contact. 

“What? It's not my fault I didn't get my morning cuddles.”

“Aww, are you sad about that?” She speaks through an exaggerated lower lip pout before kissing the fake-wounded expression off of Henry’s face. “I missed you, too.”

“It's always gonna be the horse before me, isn't it?” Henry sighs dramatically, as if resigning to his fate. 

“Of course it is!”

Henry laughs and collects her lips with his again, deepening the kiss without consciously meaning to. He shifts her light body again so that her legs are straddling his waist. 

She pulls away with a pant, eyes gleaming and bright. “Henry--!”

He kisses her on the nose. “What?” Then the lips. “What?” Then she lifts her head and there--the spot on her neck in the hollow of her throat right in front of his nose, practically beckoning him--so he presses his lips into that too, making her gasp. “What?”

“Put me _down_, you rabid creature!” She giggles, swatting him lightly with her hands. 

“Fine, fine,” he says, placing her on the ground but squeezing her backside as he does so. 

“Henry Mills!”

He throws his hands up in surrender. “I'm sorry! I'm telling you, I was deprived this morning.”

“Yeah, yeah, the _morning cuddles_.” She sticks her tongue out at him, but winks so quickly Henry nearly misses it. “I'll make it up to you, I swear.”

Henry doesn't ask what 'making it up' means, and he grins. “I'll be in suspense all day.”

“You’re disgusting.” She laughs, pulling Kaladian from his grazing to walk him into the stable. 

Henry follows her and takes the saddle from her as she untacks. “So, early morning ride. What's on your mind?”

She raises a sleek eyebrow, stalling in her brushing for a moment. “You know me way too well.” When Henry fails to prompt her, she continues. “It’s nothing. Just...stupid paranoia.”

Henry shakes his head and does his best to keep his voice light to ease the weight in his gaze. “No such thing. If you, of all people, are scared, there’s a friggin’ reason for it.”

For a moment, it looks as though Ella might drop it. Despite himself, Henry feels his stomach turn when he realizes that as long as they’ve been together, and how well he might be able to read her, there are so many things about her that he doesn’t know; so many things twisting in her sharp mind that she never voices aloud. 

Instead, she sighs and nods at him, leading Kaladian out to pasture. A long pause lapses, but she finally turns again to face him. “I’ve been thinking about -- _my deal_ a lot lately,” she begins, dropping her voice seemingly unconsciously when she begins to cast light on the subject she would rather keep in the dark. 

Henry understands immediately and feels a chill for a moment or two in his bloodstream. “Oh.”

She bolts Kaladian’s stall door and turns towards him fully again. “I’m probably being paranoid. But I swear I thought I saw him at the market last week.”

Henry feels a small fire ignite in his belly. “You saw him? How did he find us? Why didn’t you tell me?”

She winces and Henry realizes he’s taken a quick step forward. He stops. Her tanned cheeks darken in a blush and she fails to meet his eyes. “I don’t know -- I didn’t want to worry you? I didn’t know if it was real. Also…” She trails off, letting out a breath. “If I said it out loud, it made it real.”

Henry’s muscles relax and he walks more slowly toward her and places gentle hands on her tense shoulders. “Hey,” he says softly, waiting for her to look at him. She does, eyes wide and wet and honey-brown. “I’m sorry. I get it. I do. And if Facilier _has_ found us, we’ll figure it out. _I’ll_ figure it out. I’ll make him beg for his shitty life.” He spits out, muttering the last part mainly to himself.

Ella shakes her head. “Henry, don’t. We’ve worked so hard for this quiet life for us. What about Lucy?”

“Lucy is exactly who I’m thinking of. Ella, I don’t want this man threatening our family anymore. Who does he think he is? You’ve already paid dearly for what happened between you two. What more could he possibly want? You’re _done. We’re_ done doing business with him.”

Ella is quiet for a long time. Then she drops her head and Henry watches her dark curls fall over her shoulders. “Maybe we should leave this town and try somewhere new.”

Henry sucks in a breath and wraps his arms fully around her narrow frame. “Honey, we’ve already tried that. We left your kingdom and traveled hundreds of miles away to _nowhere_, to where we are now. If he can find us here, he can find us anywhere.”

“Please don’t do anything, Henry. Can we drop it for now?” Controlled panic is rearing in her eyes, and Henry holds her closer though his heart is racing and pumping dark thick blood through his body at the thought of the breach in his family’s safety. He’s not listening to his wife. 

_The Shadowman_ will leave them alone, or Henry will make sure of it.

\---

**STORYBROOKE, MAINE, 2022.**

“So, let me guess. You left to find Dr. Facilier?”

Regina and Henry are both sitting up in the king-sized bed now, the cream-colored silk sheets pooled and wrinkled around their bodies. The only light in the room is brought in by the moon and the flickering flame of a scented candle lit hours ago. 

Henry has realized, through the course of telling his story to his mother, that the telling makes it easier. He still feels shame, and he still has trouble meeting Regina’s dark familiar eyes, but he’s able to sort through his emotions and find causes and effects in his story that had become lost and blurred with time. It feels, almost, like the very beginnings of forgiving himself. The thought thickens the lump in his throat, and he nods towards his mother.

“Well, I am my mothers’ son. Can’t very well leave things well enough alone, now can I?” He sighs, earning a small chuckle from Regina. “So yes, I did, but not right away. I knew that Ella wouldn’t want me to go; she’d literally _asked_ me not to. But the idea was so set in my mind, and I couldn’t leave it alone. I was so..._scared_ of what would happen if I didn’t, I wasn’t exactly thinking about what might happen if I _did_. All I knew is that I wanted the bastard to leave my family alone, once and for all. I was so tired of my wife constantly looking over her shoulder and feeling like she was living on the run.”

“Henry,” Regina interrupts softly and smoothly, running a gentle hand down his tense arm. “I don’t blame you at all for that. Who could blame you? You were protecting your family.” She can’t help her breath hitching on that last sentence. _His family._

He nods, but memories flash in front of his eyes in short, machine-gunfire bursts.

_Leaving home. Leaving Ella. Leaving Lucy. In the night._

_Tracking him down. Letting himself into Facilier’s shack, walking straight into a trap. Not caring. Demanding that he leave his family alone._

_A laugh._

_A doll, one that looked like a young boy with a mop of brown hair and a red striped scarf and a black coat. One that looked like him. A needle. A sinking realization in his heart and his face draining of all life._

_A needle stuck deep into the handmade doll’s right leg, and stabbing, unthinkable pain in his own that brought him to the dirt floor, writhing in pain and screams._

_A leg that was never the same again._

_Another laugh from the witch doctor saying that he had been waiting to see if he would come. And a promise to him that he would never stop trying to get to his wife. And just how much worse he had made everything for his family._

_Crawling home._

Henry squeezes his eyes shut, locking away the memories once more and unknowingly massaging his right knee. “I found him and left my family’s scent all over the place and gave him a trail right to where we were living. I made it _so easy_ for him. What was I expecting to do when I got there?” 

Regina’s breathing quiets and he listens to her. “Kill him?”

He gropes and finds her hand in the dark. “Yeah. Maybe I was.”

The silence stretches on, but little by little, Henry finds that he can breathe easier. Three years of guilt finding a place to live in his past and to heal in his heart.

“It’s not your fault, Henry,” she says again, and Henry kisses the knuckles of the hand his fingers are curled into. She smells the same.

“Left with a souvenir, anyway,” he sighs, finding a way to joke by lifting his right leg off of the bed and patting it fondly with his free hand. “This baby right here is a constant reminder.” In the years since the incident, he’s gotten significantly better at using his leg and his limp is greatly improved, but still there. The past three years on the run have given him plenty of time and material to convince himself that the never quite gone-away pain is what he deserves.

He glances over at his mother, who looks horrified, and a layer beneath, he sees a very familiar fire burning in her ebony eyes. “He was the one who hurt your leg, Henry?” She asks, like she already knows, but is asking for confirmation. He knew that she was looking at it earlier when he walked over to the couch where they had their first real conversation in many, many years--and it’s a relief to get it out in the open.

“Yep,” he says through a gust of breath, then turns to face her again with a smirk. “At least this gives me and Grandpa Gold something in common, eh?”

They both laugh at that and Regina gently bumps their heads together before placing a kiss on his temple. When silence reigns for another few minutes, Regina prompts him. “Then what happened?”

Henry shrugs. “Not much else to tell, I guess. I limped back home, told my wife that I unintentionally placed our family in more danger, and within the next couple of days, we left. The past three years we have been camping out, moving locations, constantly looking for a way to change realms. We had to come home.” He pauses, thinking of the pressure and pain and guilt he felt in those years, knowing he had greatly helped this along. The fear that Ella felt, knowing she was the reason Facilier was hunting them down. The strain it placed on their marriage, though they found their way through it and came out stronger. And then, “When we finally found a magic bean, it almost seemed too easy.” He laughs. “I almost didn’t even trust it. But last night, we used it, and walked into this morning for you. And I guess you know the rest, hm?”

She nods, and burrows her head into his shoulder. He realizes then, perhaps more than any other moment that day, truly how much he had missed her. And for the first time in years, he feels truly at peace.

His adventure is finally over; his family is safe.

\---

_The portal opens._

_The man and his wife and their child join hands, hesitate, then walk in, seemingly blinking out of existence. The portal will remain open for another fraction of a second._

_He casts himself into the burning suspended rift in time, and the portal winks out behind him._

_Pavement beneath his feet, morning air, and a clock tower in front of him._

_And the family he has followed do not notice him._


End file.
